NORA is a large scale international alliance among research universities, corporations and agencies, founded, rooted and coordinated by Rui Perdigão and Julia Hall from Meteoceanics.
Phase Red: NORA Pyrodynamica
Rooted in our mission to provide cutting-edge analytics, modeling and decision support to strengthen wildfire preparedness and resilience through frontier science and technology, NORA Pyrodynamica emerged to nurture the following ventures bringing Phase Red in methodological consistency and complementarity with those of Phase Blue:
- Peering into pyrogenic and fire risk systems to shed light onto the fundamental dynamics and predictability of fire emergence and propagation, including the emergence of new pyro-meteorological regimes, novel dynamic features, elusive critical transitions and extreme events. Rather than taking weather information as input to fire models, we take the inherent coevolution among fire, weather and the combustible medium in an integrated prediction system, dynamically prognosticated with fundamental coevolutionary principles.
- Detecting early warning signs of climate change-induced abrupt shifts in fire risk and dynamics, and conversely early warning signs for abrupt critical climate system transitions from massive fire emergencies and recurrences with large scale impacts.
- Pioneering new non-invasive technologies to gauge fire system dynamics at their full tetradimensional spatiotemporal extent, taking pulse of its intrinsic dynamics.
- Reading the manifold messages conveyed across the pyrogeophysical domain, from biogeophysical dynamics within to propagation of geophysical and anthropogenic disturbances.
- Developing innovative technologies for deepening system learning beyond state of the art adaptive machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, thereby grasping the natural environmental intelligence and its underlying information physics.
- Providing early warning and decision support to entities involved in the operational aspects of fire protection ranging from civil protection agencies to firefighters and communities.
- Providing nature-based solutions to strengthen resilience against fire risks, and to regenerate fire-hit ecosystems and communities.
NORA Pyrodynamica carries the Meteoceanics Flagship reference MR-070220-RED for the initial 2020-2025 phase.