Tomas Girnius

Whether you want to model bushfires on a few acres or on large swaths of territories across the entire continent of Australia, you first need to model what those bushfires burn: the "fuel" on the ground.

In what an Al Jazeera reporter has called "likely..the largest theft of U.S. government data in the history of the United States," millions of government employee records held by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have been breached.

Armor plated steel doors. Motion detectors. State-of-the-art alarms. Multiple cross-directed laser virtual trip wires. These are enough to stymie most James Bond wannabes…unless the evil butler hands over or, more likely, sells the master key.

Fire management professionals in California and other western states are sounding the alarm that this wildfire season has the potential to be among the worst in recent years.