Student-created visualizations crafted by, counterclockwise from top, Sterling Walter, Lyrik Lee and Stacy Brossy during the 2023 Wildfire Simulation & Data Visualization Camp at Los Alamos National Laboratory that used wildfire datasets to create graphics of fire moving across landscapes. The camp teaches students to use software tools to manipulate raw data into images that lead to scientific insights.
Students in the 2023 Wildfire Simulation & Data Visualization Camp at Los Alamos National Laboratory used real wildfire datasets to create these visualizations of fire moving across actual landscapes. The camp teaches students to use software tools to manipulate raw data into compelling images that lead to new scientific insights.Â
Students in the 2023 Wildfire Simulation & Data Visualization Camp at Los Alamos National Laboratory used real wildfire datasets to create these visualizations of fire moving across actual landscapes. The camp teaches students to use software tools to manipulate raw data into compelling images that lead to new scientific insights.
Student-created visualizations crafted by, counterclockwise from top, Sterling Walter, Lyrik Lee and Stacy Brossy during the 2023 Wildfire Simulation & Data Visualization Camp at Los Alamos National Laboratory that used wildfire datasets to create graphics of fire moving across landscapes. The camp teaches students to use software tools to manipulate raw data into images that lead to scientific insights.
Courtesy Stacy Brossy
Students in the 2023 Wildfire Simulation & Data Visualization Camp at Los Alamos National Laboratory used real wildfire datasets to create these visualizations of fire moving across actual landscapes. The camp teaches students to use software tools to manipulate raw data into compelling images that lead to new scientific insights.Â
Sterling Walter
Students in the 2023 Wildfire Simulation & Data Visualization Camp at Los Alamos National Laboratory used real wildfire datasets to create these visualizations of fire moving across actual landscapes. The camp teaches students to use software tools to manipulate raw data into compelling images that lead to new scientific insights.
Last summer, a dozen high school and college students watched raging wildfires torch their way across mountainous terrain, with plumes of smoke drifting downwind from the blaze.
No, it wasn’t the conflagrations in Canada or the shockingly catastrophic blazes that raged across Maui.
These students were visualizing results from complex wildfire computer simulations run on supercomputers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The students learned and applied the same principles and tools of scientific visualization, color theory and complex wildfire dynamics that Los Alamos scientists use to research wildfire dynamics.
Hailing from diverse backgrounds — high schools and colleges across the Navajo Nation, New Mexico, southern Colorado and a historically Black university in Louisiana — the students participated in the Wildfire Simulation & Data Visualization Camp at Los Alamos. They all shared an interest in how computers can transform the bits and bytes of data into engaging images and movies that lead researchers to unexpected insights.
Pictures help us think
Sometimes a picture is worth … a whiteboard filled with equations. Or a spreadsheet filled with columns of numbers.
Many of us learn best through visual images, not text. This is also true for scientists studying a tricky phenomenon like turbulence in fluids. Turning data into images — or, even better, movies — can be a great way to wrap your head around a complex, abstract idea.
I get the appeal. I work on scientific simulations and data visualization as part of the Data Science at Scale team at Los Alamos. Much of my work is to identify new ways to represent information in a visual way that helps ocean scientists, astrophysicists or plasma physicists interpret their simulation results, spot patterns and make sense of complex phenomena. It is the coolest part of my job.
Visualizing fire
Wildfires have become an unavoidable fact of life under climate change. Though many wildfires are harmful and destructive, low-intensity wildfires can have a positive impact by clearing out dead vegetation and reducing the destruction from larger fires. This makes the science of understanding fire behavior crucial to developing strategies to prevent megafires, reduce their size and impact and manage healthy, less dangerous fires in environments where they serve an ecological purpose.
Researchers studying wildfire face a big challenge: They can’t safely conduct full-scale experiments. It’s dangerous and destructive, and manifesting a perfectly controlled environment to run multiple experiments is impossible. However, scientists can model wildfires on computers. Los Alamos has studied fire behavior extensively for years, developing advanced, physics-based computer models. These tools take into account real-world conditions such as wind, fuel moisture, temperature and terrain to simulate a fire burning across a specific landscape with specific vegetation and experiencing specific weather.
The goal is to use this type of modeling to help park rangers or land managers understand and mitigate fire risks and plan for safe, effective prescribed burns. Eventually, we may even be able to help firefighters by predicting the movement of wildfires across different terrains to help bring it under control.
Hands-on summer camp
Focusing the summer camp on wildfire seemed like a perfect way for students to see firsthand how scientific visualization works and what it can do. Some of the students are on the path to becoming scientists themselves. Others are studying to become teachers. Visualization was new to all of them, so the first few days we focused on the physics underpinning wildfire research and the software tools we use to visualize data.
Then, using real simulations generated by Los Alamos scientists, the students learned how to work with the data to bring out certain features. They saw how generating an effective visualization is an iterative process that requires working closely with wildfire experts to understand the phenomena they are representing. For example, understanding the temperature ranges that correspond to smoke versus fire is vital to ensure the proper colors are applied to the visualizations and the images and videos produced faithfully represent the data.
Several times over the duration of the camp, students applied a unique combination of colors or incorporated the components of the data in a distinctive way, emphasizing features of the simulations that we hadn’t previously explored. As a camp instructor, this is one of my favorite aspects as it gives us the opportunity to explore the data together. It highlights the inherent creativity of scientific research.
Regardless of what path these students take for their future, whether that be in scientific research or not, we hope the ideas and tools they explored as part of the camp stay a part of their lives. Picture that!
Divya Banesh is a data scientist specializing in scientific visualization at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She led the Wildfire Simulation & Data Visualization Camp with fellow Los Alamos scientists John Patchett and Rod Linn, and administrator Sarah Hoffman.
