27 June 2011
Las Conchas Wildfire: Photos
Posted by Jessica Ball
Here is a progression of photos from the Las Conchas wildfire, burning near Los Alamos, NM, from around 3pm yesterday afternoon to the evening:
At last check, the fire had gone from a few hundred acres yesterday afternoon to more than 43,000 acres this morning. Los Alamos National Lab is closed for the day, although the fire is still a mile or so away from the Lab’s southwestern border.
Can ash plume models predict smoke well?
I don’t know. I’ve seen a few that work by tracking a sampling of particles (in which case you’d have to adjust for density and shape), and some that work by treating the plume as a gravity current (which might work a little better; you’d still have to adjust the temperature and density variables, though). The vhub.org website has documentation on a few, and my thought would be that the Bent model (http://vhub.org/resources/bent) would work best, since it has the option to track individual particles but isn’t solely based on them (like Puff, an ash tracking model, http://puff.images.alaska.edu/doc/puff_user_manual.html). You would also have to adapt the model’s eruption rate into a “burn rate” and include an estimate of how much burned material is being released…but it could work!