Tom Rolinski, a wildfire scientist at Southern California Edison, has spent nearly 30 years tracking tailfire fires across the state, making him pretty good at predicting their behavior.
his responsibility is Build and mature SCE's Fire Science Program. This includes modeling fire behavior, developing seasonal outlooks, and advising on strategic mitigation efforts.
“A big part of the job is increasing situational awareness; grid hardening work. We help you decide where to strengthen and what kind of enhancements to make.” Lorinsky said. Efforts to strengthen SCE's electrical equipment.
The three-person fire science team focuses on developing tools and metrics to assess fire potential on a daily, monthly, and seasonal basis. Once an area of concern is identified, SCE uses that information to enhance wildfire mitigation and vegetation management efforts around that location in high-fire risk areas.
of The team's latest focus is refining the data used to determine weather, terrain and fuel criteria, which the fire science team calls the fire behavior triangle.
“We are continually incorporating more advanced fuel information in a comprehensive way to determine fire potential,” Rolinsky said. “When we think about fire behavior, we look at things like flame length and fire intensity. These kinds of aspects of how a fire burns are important because they can determine their size, ease of suppression, and so on. It will determine what kind of impact it will have on the local community.”
The team, along with other fire agencies, travel every two weeks to sample live vegetation and collect data. fuel moisture Required for modeling. “The more data we collect, the better the model gets,” Rolinsky said. “What we've observed over the past 40 years is that fuel depletion is occurring slowly.”
Rolinsky said this is not a dramatic change, but it is a notable change in the 40 years of historical data dating back to 1980. This means that over the past 40 years, the number of days during which fuel is likely to ignite has increased.
“Everything we do in fire science relies on good historical fire data sets. It depends on how you adjust it,” Rolinsky said.
One of the big projects the team is currently working on is implementing an up-to-date historical fire dataset, information that provides an accurate overview of everything. Locations of fires in SCE's service area since 1992. The current set is limited to 2017.
The new data will combine ignitions reported by government agencies and ignitions detected by satellites, but the technology is so advanced that scientists will be able to examine how fires spread by the hour. Now I can do that.
“The fires are just getting bigger and bigger, and the question I've always wondered is, 'Is this an anomaly or a trend?'” Because we're in the middle of it right now. , I don’t know yet,” he said. “It will be very interesting to see how the new data changes some of the modeling.
“This is going to be a game changer for us.”
For more information on wildfire mitigation efforts, please visit sce.com/wildfire.