Wildfire Analysts Are Struggling to Model Unprecedented Blazes

Arthur “Art” Gonzales didn’t appreciate how nuanced his job was until he couldn’t go to work.

In June 2020, with Covid-19 raging, a wildfire sparked up in Tonto National Forest, just north of Phoenix. A fire behavior analyst by trade, Gonzales was asked to predict the blaze’s path and pace from his home in Williams, Arizona — roughly 100 miles away. He pored over weather reports, satellite photos and videos from firefighters on the scene. But they gave him little sense of local wind speeds, nor could he ask ranchers nearby how dry the area had been lately, or how many invasive weeds were choking its gullies (the ...