Sonoma Technology fights fire with science

JDUNN

September 15, 2014

[caption id="attachment_96887" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A firefighter keeps a close eye on the Lodge fire in Mendocino County. (credit: Christopher Chung, Press Democrat)[/caption]

PETALUMA -- When the Lodge Lightning Complex wildfire started on July 30 in Mendocino County and raged on for more than three weeks, Petaluma-based Sonoma Technology sought to track its smoke plume, predict where it would move and warn people with respiratory ailments to move to safer terrain.

The 70-person company, chock full of scientists who study nearly every facet of wildfires, has contracts with the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, CAL FIRE and other government agencies which manage wildfires that plague California during summer and fall. Sonoma Technology is at the forefront of a burgeoning young science that studies every aspect of wildfire -- how to fight fire, how smoke travels and ways to avoid it, and how to manage vegetation to prevent uncontrolled conflagrations.

[caption id="attachment_96889" align="alignright" width="214"] Sonoma Technology president Lyle Chinkin has background as a meteorologist.[/caption]

Almost a quarter of the company’s roughly $10 million in annual revenue comes from contracts to write software that monitors and predicts smoke patterns from wildfire, said Lyle Chinkin, a meteorologist and Sonoma Technology’s president. The company launched some 32 years ago to study air quality. Another quarter of the business monitors air quality, contributing to the airnow.gov website for all of North America. In its early days, the company had planes that flew over Los Angeles and other cities to take air pollution samples.

NASA approached Sonoma Technology about a decade ago seeking help analyzing data from its satellites in a joint project with the Forest Service. The initial aim was to model air pollution creation and transport. “It was a natural relationship to do that with fires,” Mr. Chinkin said in an interview last week. “What’s the fire behavior? How does that fire generate smoke? Where is that smoke going?”

Sonoma Technology’s software predicts smoke distribution 72 hours in advance. Public agencies are obligated to warn the public of smoke risks, as well as fire. “Millions of people are impacted by smoke, while thousands are impacted by fire,” Mr. Chinkin said. For certain people with lung disease, “smoke can be deadly,” he said.

The Lodge fire in rugged Eel River Canyon consumed more than 12,536 acres and was finally contained. CAL FIRE, the agency that manages some fires in the state, updated its listing for the Lodge fire on Sept. 9, noting that "interior portions of the fire will continue to burn and may produce smoke for an extended period of time in the Laytonville and south Leggett area."

Over the course of the blaze, 823 fire personnel responded with 28 fire crews, 25 fire engines, 17 dozers, 10 water tenders and a helicopter. CAL FIRE Incident Management Team 4 led the fire battle.

[caption id="attachment_98897" align="alignright" width="300"] Sonoma Technology's Sean Raffuse analyzes smoke patterns from wildfires. (credit: James Dunn)[/caption]

Sean Raffuse, an engineer who studied air pollution using satellites, manages the fire and fuels science group at Sonoma Technology. “My work is on the impacts of smoke from wildfires” as well as fires set to reduce fuel loads. “Where will the smoke go, how much will it be?” Mr. Raffuse said. The company writes software to predict where smoke will go on a national scale. Fires are tracked from satellites and ground reports, analyzing fire size and amount of fuel to calculate smoke volume and movement.

This time of year, fire is a constant. The Eiler fire, which started on July 31 in Shasta County, burned more than 32,400 acres. Another fire started in Los Angeles County on Aug. 17, with evacuations in San Gabriel Canyon.

Stacy Drury, who has a Ph.D. in fire ecology, studies fire behavior for the company. “If you get a fire, what then? What kind of potential is there under different climate scenarios,” Mr. Drury said. He analyzes fuel reduction to curb fire’s destructive potential.

Tami Haste, a senior air quality scientist at Sonoma Technology, has developed a sophisticated fire modeling platform based on the Internet. She draws from other fire behavior models to create a coherent, integrated picture. “We look at structures you might want to protect. It’s a planning tool on how to manage vegetation so that if a fire were to occur, it wouldn’t cause catastrophic damage,” Ms. Haste said.

[caption id="attachment_98898" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Sonoma Technology's Tami Haste, air quality scientist, Stacy Drury (center), fire ecologist, Sean Raffuse, atmospheric scientist[/caption]

“Where would you do a prescribed burn, a biomass reduction?” said Mr. Chinkin.

Having a fire on the ground usually benefits an ecosystem. “But socially, having big fires that burn people’s homes is not good,” Mr. Drury said. “You are trying to walk that fine line, have more fires on the landscape in a way that you can control adverse effects.”

His philosophy: live with fire rather than battle it. Become a fire-adaptive community.

Under adverse conditions, wildfire wreaks havoc. The Hayman fire southwest of Denver burned 138,114 acres in 2002. The Waldo Canyon fire west of Colorado Springs in 2012 prompted evacuation of about 32,000 people. The Black Forest fire north of Colorado Springs in 2013 destroyed 486 homes -- the worst in state history. The 2013 Rim fire near Yosemite burned some 257,000 acres, mostly wild land, over two months and cost $127 million to fight. “All of these have had a lot of influence on the public,” Mr. Drury said.

“Fire might encroach the community, but smoke will go hundreds of miles,” said Mr. Chinkin.

In 2008, lightning sparked hundreds of fires in the Sierra Nevada. They burned mostly in the wilderness, hitting few structures. “Most of the impact was smoke,” Mr. Raffuse said. “It lingered for a long time, got really thick, went into all the valleys. There were impacts in the Bay Area [and] in Sacramento. This year is similar with Mendocino.”

He showed a Forest Service website based on models that Sonoma Technology helped develop. “This is today’s forecast of smoke from fires, particularly in Mendocino,” Mr. Raffuse said. “The darker the color, the higher the concentration of smoke.” Canada has had numerous fires this year; several Canadian agencies are Sonoma Technology clients.

Smoke modeling is a fledgling science. “We started writing code in 2006,” Mr. Raffuse said. “Ever since then we have been refining.”

Government agencies pay “for our time to code it up and think through the science,” Mr. Chinkin said. The software does multivariable analysis of data from satellite and ground sources, including fuel quantity and moisture content, as well as meteorological information to predict where smoke will travel. “It’s all pulled together in these sophisticated tools we developed. It’s pretty cool. It does a very good job. These are very actionable forecasts.”

Fire scientists aim to assess ember production and dispersion, and defensible space in wild and urban interface communities such as Lake Tahoe and the Oakland Hills. About six years ago, accepted defensible space around a structure was increased from 30 feet to 100. Social training is tricky, as some people have decks with lawnmowers stored beneath them, and others stack firewood next to their homes for easy access.

“Five or six cords up against your house” can give a wildfire a giant gulp of fresh fuel, Mr. Drury said.

“There’s a lot of work being done in that area,” Ms. Haste said. “That science is really immature.” The Petaluma scientists quickly see results of their work in fire management nationwide.

Fighting fires, a scientific enterprise in certain respects, is also art and intuitive judgment on the spot. Even experienced crews face danger. In the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona, 19 hotshot crew members died when fluky flames surprised them on a ridge. A Forest Service research team in Missoula, Montana studies firefighting tactics to help incident commanders on wildland blazes.

[caption id="attachment_96892" align="alignleft" width="300"] Backfires such as this one are set by firefighters to contain wildfires, which can send embers two miles ahead of the blaze.[/caption]

When flames soar 40 feet or higher, a “person with a shovel is not going to do anything except get killed,” said Mr. Drury. Instead, bulldozers clear entire ridge tops, and firefighters set controlled backfires to create boundaries that the wildfire cannot leap. A fire can shoot embers two miles ahead, so backfires must be extensive.

Some forests, such as those in Yellowstone National Park, burn infrequently but with tremendous intensity -- especially crown fires, said Mr. Drury, whose work allows strategic planning on fires. Key variables are weather, topography and fuels.

A natural forest where fire has moved through regularly is uncluttered by brush and fallen timber, Mr. Chinkin said.

Certain resilient trees and plants bounce back quickly from extreme high heat, germinating to take advantage of cleared canopy. “I have gone in after raging, catastrophic fires,” Mr. Drury said. “A week later there are sprouts coming up everywhere.”

Mr. Chinkin visited Yellowstone National Park just after a major fire in 1988. Then he visited the park 20 years later for a fire conference. “It was the healthiest carpet of green I’ve ever seen in any forest anywhere,” he said.