|Fighting Forest Fires| |Thursday, 06 September 2007 06:28| One
of the key factors in fighting forest fires is the ability to
predict the spread of the fire. Human experience and empirical
spread models provide important tools, but they are not always
accurate enough. In particular, they are often inadequate for
large, intense wildfires. In the future, however, firefighters
might get more reliable, hi-tech help predicting the flames and
the smoke. photographer Kari Greer Two FSU scientists, CSIT
professor Yousuff Hussaini and meteorology professor Phil
Cunningham, are using computer models to try to understand the
course of wildfires, hoping to be able to develop predictive
tools that can be used in real life situations. The core of
their research is not the chemistry of the combustion itself,
but the fluid mechanics describing how the fire interacts with
the surrounding air. Some major questions are: Where is the hot
air going, and how does it interact with the atmospheric winds
to feed back on the fire? The