C12 - The Terrace Standard, Wednesday, May 1, 1996 New method to WIPP forest fire THIS SUMMER, a firefighter’s most help- ful tool may be a computer. British Columbia forest firefighters are going to have a new, electronic weapon on their side this fire season. The Wildfire Ig- nition Probability Predictor (WIPP) is a computer application developed by Cana- dian Forest Service rescarchers that enables fire managers to predict, on an hourly or daily basis, the ignition, probability of a person-caused, self-sustaining wildfire ig three kinds of typical B.C. forest. By simply punching into WIPP the time of day, forest type and a few figures ob- tained from a local fire weather station, a fire manager can assess the wildfire poten- tial in a given area, position their fire crews accordingly, and save both time and money. “There are other fire danger rating and fire behaviour prediction models,”’ said Bruce Lawson, recently retired CFS head of the Victoria-based Fire -Management Pro- gram, ‘but this one is specifically geared to predicting sustained ignition probability in several B.C. forest types.”’ People cause about half of the forest fires in B.C., through careless use of matches, campfires, cigarettes, and such industrial activities as logging, road construction and land clearing. ‘‘We hope WIPP will help teduce these losses by telling us more ac- curately when and where the danger zones will be from day to day,’’ Lawson said. Who will use WIPP? This new technology will be of interest to managers in public and privale agencies and firms responsible for wildland fire pre- vention and suppression, such as the B,C. Ministry of Forests Protection Program, Canadian Parks Service, B.C. Parks, Regional Districls, Yukon Forest Service, Alberta Forest Service, the forest industry, and even Alaska Fire Service, which uses the CFS-developed Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System. . It will also be of interest to technical forestry schoois and institutions with fire programs in their curriculum. How does WIPP work? Users of the program will be asked to in- put or calculate a number of factors, such asi ~ forest type (dry or mois! lodgepole pine, or spruce-subalpine fir) - weather data (wind speed, humidity, drought index, etc., if applicable) - fine fuel moisture code - time of day Using these factors, the application calcu- lates the probability of an igniton becoming a wildfire in percent, from low (0-50 per cent), medium (50-75 per cent), to high (75-100 per cent), The process takes only a minute, because most of the data is already available from fire weather stations and fire weather fore- casts. Any additional calculations are per- formed by the computer and results are dis- played on-screen. The program is available on-diskette, for computers running the Windows operating system. It links a number of fire research products into one easy-to-use, personal computer-based application, How will this save money and resources? An average of 30,000 heclares of B.C. forest and range lands are affected by fire every year, Of this total, people-caused fires are responsible for 56 per cent of the area burned. As more and more B.C. residents estab- lish homes in or near the forest, creating wildland-urban interface communities, the danger of people-caused forest fires in- creases, WIPP could help to reduce future losses by focusing attention on the threshold con- ditions under which people-caused wild- fires start. This knowledge could help make many of these fires preventable or con- tainable before they become too large to manage. . Who paid for this project? This research project was paid for by the Canada-B.C. Partnership Agreement on Forest Resource Development (FRDA II), which expired on March 31. This article courtesy the Canadian Forest Service. LET US be your guide to a whole range of forestry information on the Internet. The Terrace Standard, in conjunction with RGS Internet Services, has for the first time tak- en its annual forestry supplement to a global audience by putting it on the World Wide Web. Most of the stories and photos you see here are accessible from anywhere in the world through the web. But you'll also find links to a wide variety of other forestry resources on the World Wide Web. From our site you can point and click to UBC's Faculty of Forestry or UNBC’s Natural Resources Faculty. Another click takes you to the Council of Forest Industries web page, or the B.C. Forest Alliance. Surf over to the Woad Fibre Network site and see how it works for yourself. If you're on the Internet, you can access aur web page by pointing your browser to: http:/www.kermode.net/forest_ You'll like us, for more than our tires... 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