Fire scientists say bigger, faster-growing wildfires expected in California: Here's what to know
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Fire science is a very active field with better fire modeling underway. What does that mean for the Park Fire and the rest of our fire season?
Mark Schwartz is an environmental science professor at UC Davis. "I don't see any reprieve in this. The last two years before this were pretty good. The two years before that, were pretty awful. And this year is gearing up to maybe be an awful year," he said.
Schwartz predicts ecosystem vulnerabilities and he says surprisingly most of California's wildfires in the last 5 years weren't even in the areas at highest risk.
MORE: Wildfire smoke may be worse for your brain than other air pollution, study says
He's not surprised the Park Fire is scorching land with remarkable speed.
"We're in a position because we have a lot of people living in the wildland urban interface where we are protecting buildings, protecting lives, protecting people at the expense of letting wildfires burn into wild areas so fires get large, and we should expect them to continue to get large," he said.
UC Davis research ecologist Hugh Safford said "I don't think there's much to stop it. We're talking weeks if not many weeks of burning ahead of us."
RELATED: Park Fire burning in NorCal 7th largest wildfire in state's history, CAL FIRE says
Safford is also the chief scientist at Vibrant Planet working to analyze wildfire risk mitigation.
"I mean the Dixie Fire a couple years ago was nearly a million acres, and this one is certainly going to hit a half million any day here with the speed it's moving at," he said.
MORE: Park Fire: CA man charged with arson for allegedly igniting largest active wildfire in US
Past fire science looked at the brush, the fuel close to the ground.
"We've ignored really, really big fuels, like things the size of the trunks for example because they didn't actually drive what happened in fires and now they are- because we have so much dead material," Sanford said.
MORE: Crews work to save displaced families, pets amidst 368,000-acre Park Fire
And then there are the plumes of smoke. We know a lot about particulates but not enough about the chemical composition of the smoke.
UC Davis Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Cristina Davis is designing cutting edge chemical sensors.
"Some of these can be put onto drones and we've been working on that with some of our colleagues so that chemical sensors can go out and sniff the air as they fly around. The other thing is they can be put on mobile units," she said.
So sensors will soon be mounted on fire trucks responding to these as fires- technology that will be ready to be deployed in the next year or two.
