PI: Melissa Lucash (University of Oregon), Co-PIs: Robert Scheller (North Carolina State University), Branda Nowell (North Carolina State University), Sam Flake (North Carolina State University), James Lamping (University of Oregon)

Extreme wildfire events are increasing, driven by the expansion of urban communities closer to forests, land management practices which suppressed wildfire, and climate change. These events have a low probability of occurring, but they exhibit exceptional fire behavior characteristics and produce severe consequences for forests and humans. While the media and field studies focus on extreme wildfire events like the Lahaina wildfire in Hawaii and the Paradise fire in California, most estimates of wildfire risk report averages, but not extreme events, and they often underestimate the effects of climate change. Our workshops will form a cohesive, interdisciplinary research team to: 1) synthesize our current understanding of extreme fire behavior, 2) isolate the current gaps in our understanding of the social and biophysical drivers that cause extreme wildfire events and risk to communities, 3) develop a roadmap for improving the representation of extreme events into models that represent social and biophysical processes, and 4) integrate a widely-used model of forest change into High Performance Computers to generate improved predictions of wildfire risk and the probability of extreme wildfire events. We will initially investigate extreme fires in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, interior Alaska, and the Southern Appalachians.