SANTA FE, N.M. — The program may look like a video game but it’s helping fire managers in New Mexico better understand the nature of wildfires and prescribed burns.

Los Alamos National Lab partnered with Santa Fe-based company SciVista to create FireVista. Picture yourself putting on a virtual reality headset and finding yourself in the thick of a wildfire. That’s what the program is.

FireVista uses data from LANL and customizable factors, such as terrain, fuels and wind speeds, to create a fully-immersive 3D environment that simulates fires.

“Predicting wind gusts or even the amount of sun exposure fuels have had before a fire arrives can be really important for predicting how intense that fire is,” said David Robinson, a wildfire researcher at LANL.

Having those predictions is crucial for fire managers, trainees and scientists.

In 2022, the U.S. government faced backlash for starting a prescribed burn that grew to become the largest wildfire in New Mexico state history – the Calf Canyon-Hermit’s Peak Fire.

Just as that fire changed the way managers view prescribed burns, FireVista could too.

“With the list of tree locations and tree types, we can build a full 3D canopy fuel model. Then, with some meteorological data, we can choose where to light a fire in the QuikFire simulation, carry it forward however long we long and look at the effects of the fire in a 3D sense,” Robinson said.

People from multiple agencies can virtually stand in a fire to see how it spreads and what factors cause it to spread. The agencies can look at a simulation’s results from anywhere in the world to see how safe a burn may be based on conditions.

It’s believed this can instill confidence in everyone, including people in New Mexico who lost trust in the U.S. Forest Service after the Calf Canyon-Hermit’s Peak Fire.

“We have much more opportunity with these QuikFire models and our visualizers for us to come to an understanding as a team, as a group with all the experts at the table, to come to those decisions of when we burn, how we burn and then getting the community involved with why we burn,” Vause said.