Dr. Rod Lin, a wildfire scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told the Science, Technology and Telecommunications Committee that Los Alamos has used physics, fluid dynamics and high‑performance computing to build two wildfire modeling tools — FireTech and QuickFire — and that those tools can help agencies plan safer prescribed burns and assess risk to communities and infrastructure.

"Fire makes its own winds," Lin said, describing a key atmospheric feedback that he said high‑resolution, coupled fire‑atmosphere models capture and that many operational tools do not. He told lawmakers FireTech is a supercomputer‑scale research platform that resolves complex interactions between fire, fuel and weather; QuickFire packages insights from that research into a faster model intended for practitioners.

The laboratory said the tools can run ensembles of simulations to map how small differences in moisture, ignition pattern or local topography change outcomes, helping crews decide when to stop, hold more resources or alter ignition strategies. Lin showed examples in which slight moisture differences or ignition‑pattern changes caused a prescribed burn to escape or to fail to achieve desired ecological outcomes.

Why it matters: Lin and lawmakers framed prescribed burning as a tool for ecological health and firefighter safety, but one that requires finer‑grained prediction when managers are being proactive. Committee members pressed on operational questions, including how quickly the models can be run and whether agencies other than LANL can use them. Lin said QuickFire is already used by the U.S. Forest Service and by some Defense Department practitioners; FireTech can require supercomputing resources and historically has been run by laboratory partners.

Committee exchanges highlighted practical constraints. Lin said the Forest Service can now generate first‑cut fuels data for any location in the continental U.S. within about an hour and that FireTech can run "two or three times faster than real time" on smaller domains, making a useful, though not instantaneous, support tool for operational decisions. He also said DOD has become a prominent funder because its ranges and munitions testing both increase fire risk and require aggressive landscape management.

Lawmakers asked whether nonfire treatments — such as goats or mechanical thinning — are part of the toolbox. Lin said managers commonly use a mix: mechanical treatments to reduce surface fuels, followed by prescribed fire to sustain a managed regime. He noted costs for mechanical treatment are substantially higher per acre and that many DOD lands maintain prescribed burning on roughly three‑year cycles, while some stakeholders for New Mexico landscapes estimate multi‑decadal intervals; Lin did not endorse any single interval.

Lin described several dangerous phenomena the coupled models help illuminate, including density currents and downbursts that have accelerated fires in incidents that caused fatalities. He discussed a simulation of the 2002 Dude Fire in which a density current intersected a burning area and dramatically increased spread rates; he said better detection and tailored alerts could reduce firefighter exposure.

On training and technology transfer, Lin described a LANL collaboration with a Santa Fe firm, Cyvista, using virtual reality to accelerate firefighter training and familiarity with complex fire behavior. He emphasized that prescribed burns "when they're done right, they are well engineered" and argued the models can help codify and accelerate that engineering for less‑experienced crews.

Ending: Lin and committee members agreed the science should be paired with better communications to communities and with realistic assessments of costs and resources; no formal action was taken at the hearing.