The NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Wildfires internal workshop took place on 4/28-29/22, at Goddard Space Flight Center. The workshop was led by the FireTech program managers from NASA Headquarters (HQ), which included David Green, Barry Lefer, Mike Falkowski, and Michael Seablom. Also, Parminder Kopardekar, Director of NASA Aeronautics Research Institute (NARI), attended to discuss how the NASA aeronautics community can jointly contribute with SMD to address the wildfire problem.
The workshop's primary goal was to map NASA Center's capabilities useful for addressing pre-, active-, and post-fire management aspects in the US. Research, applications, and technology were given equal importance during the workshop. FireTech managers envisioned a 5-year focused Wildfire program with directed and competed for funding, ending with a delivered system useful to the community. The program begins on 10/1/22. The vision from HQ is that all Centers doing science, technology, and instrumentation will have a chance to contribute to the efforts.
Approximately 40 participants from different NASA centers attended the sessions. The two-day workshop started with the recap of the SMD wildfire stakeholder engagement workshop organized in February 2022. Krishna Vadrevu (ST11) presented a summary of the post-fire ecosystem impacts and recovery outputs. The rest of Day-1 and Day-2 focused on NASA Center's expertise and capabilities in addressing the wildfire problem. Specific to Marshall Space Flight Center, Vadrevu, Christopher Schultz, and Kevin Fuell (ST11) highlighted in-house capabilities on fire mapping, monitoring, emissions estimation, lightning impacts on fires, SPoRT potentials, post-fire vegetation mapping, recovery, and effects, including applications development and capacity building activities. The findings from the current workshop are being summarized and posted on the NASA SMD Wildfire website (https://nari.arc.nasa.gov/smdwildfire). Strong emphasis was on cross-center collaborations. The outputs will be useful to strategize and plan the future of Wildfire-related programmatic activities at HQ and engage NASA Centers for successful wildfire management in the US. The next meeting is planned in the fall at NASA Ames Research Center.
