![]() ![]() Those kinds of weather conditions are tricky to map, Sapsis says, because you want to take into account those very destructive types of fires, but also need to consider a longer, 50-year period.įire “hazard” is a measure of how a fire will behave, based on the physical conditions. “We’re just now getting the capacity to estimate at a realistic scale what these areas, footprints, if you will, of these dry windy events are … and what the magnitudes of these events are,” Sapsis says. Sapsis says that fire modeling technology is improving all the time, and that the new models Cal Fire is testing are taking into account dry, windy weather. ![]() Original 2019 story continues below New Maps to Assess Weather and Development (Cal Fire was expected to release new draft maps to test in winter 2019/2020 that took new risk factors into account. We do the best we can based on the tools we have,” he says.Īnd, as recent fires have tragically demonstrated, living outside a higher-risk zone doesn’t mean that you’re safe.Įxtreme winds drove much of the damage in Paradise during last the November 2018 Camp Fire and in the North Bay during the October 2017 fire siege, and current fire maps don’t take that factor into account. ![]() “Estimating a burn probability is an estimate. Sapsis says it’s important to remember that the Cal Fire-defined risk zones are showing only a probability. “How likely is the fire? And what is the nature of the fire?” “The model is basically trying to describe areas and their likelihood for a structure to ignite,” Dave Sapsis, a Cal Fire researcher who specializes in mapping and research models, told KQED in 2019. ![]()
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