"Infrared monitoring: Connecting wildfire behaviour to ecological systems" by Prof. Eulàlia Planas and Prof. Elsa Pastor

Past Event

Date
08 November 2012, 5:15pm - 6:45pm

Location
Herbertson Room, OUCE
Herbertson Room, OUCE, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY

This lecture is hosted by the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests, an Oxford Martin School Centre

Summary: The study of the ecological effects of fire necessarily involves some understanding of the physical processes that take place in a wildfire in order to ask proper research questions and to obtain meaningful fire behaviour metrics. Infrared (IR) monitoring is applied nowadays to different wildfire management problems; more specifically IR thermography is particularly suitable for obtaining valuable and reliable information about fire phenomena. Prof. Planas and Prof. Pastor will talk about some of their recent work in IR monitoring of wildfire experiments observed from aircraft and from ground based vantage points. They will show the main outputs of their research activities in the Australian semi-arid mallee-heath woodlands and in the Peruvian high altitude Puna grasslands, highlighting the capabilities that IR thermal image processing offers in terms of fire front spread rate and heat transfer analysis.

Speakers:

  • Professor Eulàlia Planas, Associate Professor, Chemical Engineering Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech (UPC)
  • Professor Elsa Pastor, Associate Professor, Chemical Engineering Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech (UPC)

Biographies:

  • Prof Eulàlia Planas is an Associate Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech (UPC). She has been the Head of the Center for Tecnological Risk Studies (CERTEC) since 2009. CERTEC is an organization whose objectives are research and education in the various fields of environmental management and risk assessment. Eulàlia’s fields of expertise are related to wildfire management and risk assessment in the chemical industry.
  • Prof Elsa Pastor is an Associate Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech (UPC). She develops her research in diverse fields of wildfire management at the Centre for Technological Risk Studies (CERTEC). She has developed different process IR imagery methodologies to study wildfire dynamics and suppression products effectiveness.

OCTF seminar followed by drinks