These days it’s easy to create a fire model, but harder to interpret the results.
This is true for experts and even more so for journalists.
Instead of just burning off huge tracts of land and endangering all the local wildlife, today’s invention is to employ UAVs, each equipped with a camera and a small, gas-powered blowtorch. The downdraft from the rotors would be used to fan the flames in the desired direction.
This would allow a team of remotely located foresters to burn only smallish regions in advance of the firefront.
They could decide where to burn, based on feeding known wind behaviour into an agent based model. Running several simulations (perhaps on a parallel supercomputer) could be done faster than the fire could move, enabling some kind of optimal burn pattern to be calculated and then implemented.
