Team: 29
School: Media Arts Collaborative Charter School
Area of Science: physics
Interim: This project is about helping to stop or slow the spread of fire in high-risk areas. According to Ellen Gray of NASA droughts will become more common and dryer. With Global Warming making droughts more common and dryer preventing or slowing the spread of wildfires has become more and more of a necessity. With these two compounding factors, fire spread and control has become more necessary than ever. If we don’t do something to make fewer forest fires we could lose too many trees and die.
To help solve this problem we will be making a model that shows different ways to prevent fire spread and how effective those methods are at slowing/stopping fire spread.
To help this be as accurate as we can get it we will make a simulation of a forest where we can change everything. The temperature, the wind, the moisture, and the density. The sliders can be changed to increase/decrease the spread of fire. There will be a graph to show alive trees and burned trees. This is so that it can be known what affects forest fires the most and how to prevent that.
At this stage we have mostly been doing research ie; what factors we should use in our model, testing proven fire prevention methods like fire breaks, and finding sources that agree that wildfires are a problem. The sources are mostly about how forest fires happen and how they can be prevented. We spent most of the time researching and thinking because most of the time spent coding is actually spent doing research and thinking about how you're going to do it.
We think that less air and more moisture will lower forest fires by a lot. Because the wind will spread to fewer trees and the moisture has a chance of making the tree not light on fire in the first place. We also think that temperature affects forest fires. We think that if the temperature is lower it will make them spread less but if it's higher it will spread more. Fire is temperature, oxygen, and fuel, so if you take out the temperature it's just oxygen and fuel and that can't make fires.
Team Members:
Sponsoring Teacher: harry henderson