Author(s) :

Hsien-Chuan Fan.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

Against the backdrop of global warming, extreme weather is becoming increasingly frequent, and megafires are rising steadily in frequency, scale, and destructive power, posing a growing threat to immovable facilities such as astronomical observatories located deep within forests. The paper first describes the ecological role of wildfire and the drivers of megafires, and reviews cases in which observatories-Mount Stromlo, Siding Spring, Lick, Mount Wilson, the Allen Telescope Array, and Kitt Peak-were struck or threatened by wildfire. On this basis, and recognizing that fire records for any single site are characterized by small samples and poor information, a two-stage optimal protection decision model grounded in grey-system theory is constructed. In the first stage, a grey-prediction is built from the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center burned-area series, and the urgency of the threat is gauged from the exceedance frequency of megafire years and the roughly 30-year fire cycle of the Lulin Observatory site. In the second stage, criterion weights are determined objectively by grey entropy, and grey relational analysis is used to rank five protection strategies under multiple criteria. The results show that the “integrated prevention plus managed evacuation” strategy attains the highest grey relational grade (γ = 0.91), markedly outperforming conventional aggressive suppression (γ = 0.44); the ranking is robust to the distinguishing coefficient. The model provides a cardinal decision basis for wildfire protection at mountain observatories such as Lulin.

Keywords :

Megafire, Ecological role, Grey predication, Grey entropy, Grey relational analysis, Cardinal decision

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