1,000-Acre Forest Fire to Burn in the Name of Science

A 1,000-acre fire that forestry officials and scientists plan to ignite in the name of science this morning in the Angeles National Forest will be the focus of a meticulously planned effort involving dozens of scientists, eight aircraft, and 280 firefighters.

If, as expected, dry, clear weather and westerly winds prevail at dawn today, a meteorologist from the South Coast Air Quality Management District will give the go-ahead for the controlled burn, which scientists say will be the most intensively monitored fire in history.

The fire, to be set in Lodi Canyon about 30 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, would be set at about 9 a.m., and is expected to burn for four hours. The plume should be visible throughout much of the Los Angeles basin.

The fire is intended to give scientists a chance to study phenomena such as fire-caused erosion, air pollution, and “nuclear winter,” the controversial theory that smoke from fires ignited by nuclear weapons could block sunlight and chill the Earth, destroying crops and ecosystems.

“Two years of work come down to one day,” said Philip Riggan, the U.S. Forest Service scientist in charge of the project. Conceived in 1984 as a simple controlled burn of overgrown brush, the project, which has been delayed several times by weather, has grown into a many-layered, $750,000 scientific experiment.

Firefighting crews and aircraft from the county fire department, state Department of Forestry and U.S. Forest Service will ring the area to keep the blaze within a prescribed perimeter, said Capt. Scott Franklin of the county fire department.

Once the fire is under way, instrument-laden aircraft from research centers in Washington State, Nevada and New Mexico will converge over the canyon, some mapping the smoke and flames, others collecting smoke samples by diving directly into the 10,000-foot plume of smoke and water clouds that are predicted to form over the fire.

And flying at 65,000 feet, a modified U-2 spy plane from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View will carry a $600,000 infrared camera to record detailed images of the fire. This system is the precursor to a planned satellite-borne sensor that would monitor forest fires around the Earth, said NASA scientist James Brass.

Just a few hundred feet above the flames, a fire department helicopter will sample gases produced during combustion and take them to a portable laboratory nearby, where technicians will check for compounds that might contribute to a global “greenhouse effect,” said NASA scientist Joel Levine. Forest fires are believed to play a large part in adding gases to the atmosphere that retain solar heat--as the glass panes of a greenhouse do--a process that may eventually warm the Earth. But few measurements of such a phenomenon have ever been made, Levine said.

One of the trickiest jobs during the fire will be to control all the air traffic above the fire, said Gerry Vice of the U.S. Forest Service, who helped develop the flight plan for the project. He is an “air attack supervisor” who serves as an air traffic controller during forest fires.

No Time for Practice

Because of a shortage of funds and the fact that the participating aircraft were scattered at bases around the country, there have been no practice flights. “Nobody who’s flying on this fire has ever flown with everybody else,” he said.

“Normally, the air attack supervisor on a fire will sit 5,000 or 6,000 feet above and watch what’s going on,” Vice said. But in this case, with research craft flying at 65,000 and 20,000 feet, as well as helicopters from the fire department and the media at low altitudes, he said, “we’re going to have to maintain pretty tight conditions.”

Except for the authorized research aircraft, all other air traffic will be prohibited from venturing within five miles of the fire. The air attack supervisor for the project, John Stevenson, said he will circle the area in an airplane and keep track of the various craft by receiving frequent radio reports of their positions and headings.