A Fire Community Observatory: Interdisciplinary, AI-informed Post-Fire Rapid Response for Improved Water Cycle Science at Watershed Scale
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States)
- Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, CA (United States)
- Univ. of California, Davis, CA (United States)
- Univ. of California, Merced, CA (United States)
- California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States). Jet Propulsion Lab. (JPL)
Wildfire is an ecological disturbance that disrupts the hydrological cycle. In the past few years, a record number of multiple-and-compounding fires have occurred across urban-wildland gradients in the Western United States. Changes to watershed hydrological partitioning in response to fires (infiltration, runoff, evapotranspiration) presents unprecedented challenges to “Water-in-the-West” through negative impacts to water supply and its quality, and is a direct threat to downstream communities, groundwater, and drinking water supply infrastructure. While much work is being done to advance Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) use during fires for emergency response (i.e. predict fire movement, direct evacuations), significant potential exists to use AI/ML to address three scientific grand challenges that are rarely addressed in a convergent science context: 1) how to enhance the potential resiliency of a landscape before fire(s), 2) how to cost-effectively and optimally monitor watershed changes after fires, and 3) how to predict future hydrological and biogeochemical trajectories in fire-impacted watershed given climate change. This whitepaper addresses DOE Focal Area 1: Data acquisition and assimilation enabled by machine learning, AI, and advanced methods.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States); Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Davis, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Merced, CA (United States); California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States). Jet Propulsion Lab. (JPL)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- OSTI ID:
- 1769642
- Report Number(s):
- AI4ESP1099
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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