Local university faculty members will be studying the devastating Lahaina wildfire in Maui. Two assistant professors with the University of Nevada, Reno are working on preventing similar disasters.
Professor Ebrahimian and Professor Lareau are teaming with researchers at the University of Hawai'I and University of Buffalo to gather data and figure how to be two steps ahead of future wildfires.
Hamed Ebrahimian, civil & environmental engineering assistant professor, says, "The objective is we want to be ahead of the fire. As the fire is happening in wildland right now, we are more in the reactive situation, we have to see where the fire is going and then make a decision. We want to be ahead of the fire in terms that we want to predict how the fire is going to behave and where it's going to go."
Ebrahimian says this will help them make informed decisions on how they can protect communities and manage wildfires. But in order to predict these fires, the team is gathering data from multiple sources such as social media posts, time-stamped photos, and then using AI to process the information for modeling and simulation research. Lareau tells me that there's some very specific work that needs to happen within the next year due to the funding they've received from the National Science Foundation.
Neil Lareau, physics assistant professor, says, "They've given us funding for the next year to really dive into this problem and part of that is acting quickly to get what we can out of those social media posts as well as people's recollection while all of that is still fresh in the now and hopefully come up with some significant outcomes really within the next year."
While we can't fully prevent wildfires from ever happening again, the team says this doesn't mean we can't learn to manage them. And they're hoping the Lahaina fire teaches them exactly how to do that.
