R&D 100 winner of the day: QUIC-Fire

QUIC-Fire is the first laptop-capable, real-time speed wildland fire prediction software to explicitly model a fire’s two-way interaction with the atmosphere and 3D heterogeneous vegetation — the very factors that drive fire and are essential to simulating complex site-specific wildfire and prescribed fire scenarios. QUIC-Fire transforms a fire practitioner’s ability to assess risk, optimize fuel treatments, and plan prescribed burns. With QUIC-Fire, practitioners can quickly model how a fire will spread in situations previously impossible for fast-running tools. QUIC-Fire captures the critical influences of 3D vegetation structure, interactions between multiple fires, variable winds, and complex topography at meter-scale resolutions. Such capabilities typically require a supercomputer, yet QUIC-Fire runs on a laptop orders of magnitude faster than supercomputer models. QUIC-Fire can also serve as a prescribed fire “flight simulator” to train fire practitioners. As the first fast-running tool with these capabilities, QUIC-Fire will revolutionize the assessment of wildfire risks and behavior, bolster safe expansion of prescribed fire, and train new fire professionals to help meet challenges of reducing fire risks and sustaining ecosystem resilience in evolving environments.