Researchers and Energy Safety staff push for open data, shared modeling and a 'commons' to speed wildfire risk tools

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego's WIFIRE Lab and data staff from the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety (OEIS) told the California Wildfire Safety Advisory Board on March 5 that making models and data more findable, interoperable and reusable will speed practical tools for mitigation and response.

University researcher Ilkay Altintas, director of the WIFIRE Lab, described a 'commons' approach that bundles a community of practice, a marketplace for reusable open models/data and a cloud-hosted environment where researchers and practitioners can run and compare models. Altintas urged the board to favor open, transparent datasets and modular models so utility and public-safety planners can test alternatives and scale successful tools.

Altintas said the nature of fire modeling requires a range of model types and resolutions. "One size does not fit all in fire modeling," she told the board, noting a tradeoff between fast 2D rate-of-spread models used for early incident awareness and deeper 3D fuels-and-behavior models used for fuel treatment and prescribed fire…