Science and Technology
Last Review/Updated: April 27, 2004
Fighting fire is like fighting a war. The application of science and technology provides greater intelligence to help win the war against wildfires. Alberta is a leader in promoting and applying new fire management technology. This includes the development of new models, tools and systems to provide better decision support for delivering cost effective and efficient forest protection.
Although fighting fire still requires resources on the ground, including fire fighters with hand tools, the battle is increasingly being fought using advanced science and technology. Computer models and systems don't put fires out, they can process and assess large amounts of data to provide important intelligence. What is the optimal resource mix (amount, type and location) to preposition suppression capability in anticipation of predicted fire behaviour for the next 24 hours? Computer fire applications can help to answer these questions. These models however, require current and reliable spatial data for the Forestry Area and adjacent cooperative zones. Fuel, weather, topography, and base geographical data are all used in spatial decision support fire management systems.
The topics included in this section are:
