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Rebuild:LA Episode 015 - Where the Next Destructive Wildfire Will Be with NASA’s Dr. Chris Potter
Manage episode 470755337 series 3644493
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Dr. Chris Potter calls it VERM, or vegetation ember index. He’s an earth scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and he’s developed a new mapping product that shows VERM areas. And VERM areas are those places most vulnerable to fire. In other words, he and his research team are predicting the next place a destructive wildfire will strike. The product is free because it’s produced by NASA and paid for with federal tax dollars. But like so many scientific initiatives funded by the federal government, there’s a chance it will soon hit the chopping block. Dr. Potter sits down with host Cameron Barrett to talk about the VERM maps, what we can learn from them, and how we can use them to mitigate a wildfire before it even starts.
Resources:
Chapters
1. Intro (00:00:00)
2. NASA's Ames Research Center (00:03:30)
3. What is VERM? (00:05:00)
4. The usefulness of VERM Maps (00:08:00)
5. How deadly embers casts can be (00:11:00)
6. Prescribed burns (00:13:20)
7. Brush clearance (00:15:30)
8. Rethinking how we do prescribed burns (00:19:10)
9. Different types of embers (00:21:20)
10. Tracking air quality from a satellite (00:25:25)
11. Getting VERM maps into the right hands at the right time (00:28:30)
12. The devastating cuts to scientific funding (00:34:30)
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