HANGAR ALPHA LLC — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase II: 8.1

Description

The impact of wildfires intensifies each year affecting public lands as well as communities acrossthe wildland-urban interface. Wildfires are the fastest growing economic climate risk with damagesincreasing three-fold each decade. Advanced data-driven fire behavior analytics software isurgently needed by first responders and public land managers as well as private sectorstakeholders to predict fire risk and behavior plan for effective resource deployment and mitigateimpact to vulnerable assets and resources. Hangar Alpha LLC is developing Cornea wildland firemanagement software for near-real-time fire analytics. Building on Phase I work the Phase IIresearch has the following objectives: (1) further improve prediction of Suppression DifficultyIndices and Potential Control Locations and add new predictive metrics such as ignition likelihoodfire spread and perimeter and risk; (2) improve the execution and calculation infrastructure; and (3)develop a complete data warehouse and finalize the user interface. Accuracy will be improvedthrough machine learning and incorporating a comprehensive set of data layers that account forweather remote sensing data and geographic features. Computational performance will encompassscalability stability and observability.The result will be an advanced software solution for fire behavior analytics for use by wildfireincident managers and other stakeholders. The public sector market (federal state and countyagencies) will use Cornea's innovations for response to active wildfires and preplanning for fireseason. The private sector market (e.g. insurers reinsurers and utilities) will use Cornea for riskassessment mitigation strategic planning and gathering additional insights from predictiveanalytics.