Fighting Wildfires with Big Data

As InformationWeek reports, a team of researchers, technologists, and firefighters from the University of California at San Diego and the University of Maryland, with support from the National Science Foundation, have come together to create a far-reaching simulation, visualization, and prediction model for understanding wildfires called WIFIRE. Although still partially in development, WIFIRE has some prototypes and pilot applications now available.

Once completed, WIFIRE will be a vast open network with specialized interfaces and messages sent to receivers. Indeed, according to Elena Malykhina, "having such infrastructure in place would be especially useful during massive environmental events like the wildfires that California firefighters have been battling."

With summer wildfires expected to increase in the next 50 years, WIFIRE is a high-resolution, life-saving data tool with the potential to understand the patterns of wildfires.