Tucson Standard

Wildfire management involves complex decision-making processes where fire managers must balance environmental conditions, weather forecasts, and climatic trends. To assist in these high-stakes situations, researchers at the University of Arizona have developed a tool that simplifies data for those managing wildfires on the ground.

The Burn Period Tracker is an experimental weather monitoring web application providing real-time information on the number of hours per day when relative humidity is 20% or less. This metric, known as the "burn period," has become essential for fire managers in assessing wildfire risks.

After years of development and refinement, this tool is now utilized by the Southwest Coordination Center and featured in the U.S. Forest Service Risk Management Assistance dashboard. It has gained widespread adoption among fire managers throughout the Southwest.

The inception of this tool began with researchers from the University of Arizona's College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences questioning what information wildland fire managers rely on to make decisions. Their investigation involved focus groups and surveys with hundreds of inter-agency wildfire managers.

George Frisvold, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, noted that they found inconsistencies in decision-making due to varying data sources used by fire managers. Despite many advanced tools available, these were often left unused due to their complexity.

One wildland fire manager highlighted: "There's just so much information and so many independently created applications or data sources that it's nearly impossible for one person to be familiar with everything."

Dan Ferguson from the Department of Environmental Science recognized early on that experience from someone within fire management was crucial for guiding relevant questions. This led them to collaborate with Chuck Maxwell, an operational fire meteorologist at the time.

Their partnership resulted in identifying agency-specific differences affecting decision-making processes among fire managers. The team discovered that simplicity was key; managers needed practical solutions rather than perfect ones.

Maxwell proposed using a familiar metric already hand-calculated by field analysts: the burn period. With his suggestion, Michael Crimmins from U of A Cooperative Extension quickly developed a prototype within three days.

Crimmins emphasized that "the Burn Period Tracker is the ground-up version of listening and doing what the fire managers say."

Supported by the university's Climate Assessment for the Southwest program under Arizona Institute for Resilience, this project aims to streamline essential data access for wildfire management professionals across regions.