ARLINGTON, Texas — A UT Arlington professor is getting a major NASA grant to develop a tool to predict how freshwater supplies are affected by wildfires.
NASA is awarding a three-year $824,020 grant to assistant civil engineering professor Adnan Rajib. Rajib and a team of computer scientists, satellite technology experts, and water managers will develop a tool to help states, counties, and cities predict the damage wildfires will cause to freshwater supplies.
“Wildfires dramatically alter the natural flow of water and contaminate freshwater sources with debris from burned areas," Rajib explained. "Water sources can take years to recover in severely affected regions. There is no easy way to predict such cascading hazards of wildfires, meaning communities are in the dark when protecting freshwater resources.”
Each year, wildfires cost the U.S. between $400 and $900 billion, and each year, they become more and more common. Rajib's tool will use NASA satellite data to manage and mitigate wildfires' contamination of water sources.
