Study – The Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy

Study: Satellite-based aerosol optical depth estimates over the continental U.S. during the 2020 wildfire season: Roles of smoke and land cover

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Abstract: Wildfires produce smoke that can affect an area >1000 times the burn extent, with far-reaching human health, ecologic, and economic impacts. Accurately estimating aerosol load within smoke plumes is therefore crucial for understanding and mitigating these impacts. We evaluated the effectiveness of the latest Collection 6.1 MODIS Multi-Angle Implementation of Atmospheric Correction (MAIAC) algorithm […]

February 26, 2024

Study: Climate change greatly escalates forest disturbance risks to US property values

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Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change is projected to drive increases in climate extremes and climate-sensitive ecosystem disturbances such as wildfire with enormous economic impacts. Understanding spatial and temporal patterns of risk to property values from climate-sensitive disturbances at national and regional scales and from multiple disturbances is urgently needed to inform risk management and policy efforts. […]

November 20, 2023

Study: Future climate risks from stress, insects and fire across US forests

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Abstract: Forests are currently a substantial carbon sink globally. Many climate change mitigation strategies leverage forest preservation and expansion, but rely on forests storing carbon for decades to centuries. Yet climate-driven disturbances pose critical risks to the long-term stability of forest carbon. We quantify the climate drivers that influence wildfire and climate stress-driven tree mortality, […]

November 20, 2023

Study: Incorporating a canopy parameterization within a coupled fire‐atmosphere model to improve a smoke simulation for a prescribed burn

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Abstract: Forecasting fire growth, plume rise and smoke impacts on air quality remains a challenging task. Wildland fires dynamically interact with the atmosphere, which can impact fire behavior, plume rises, and smoke dispersion. For understory fires, the fire propagation is driven by winds attenuated by the forest canopy. However, most numerical weather prediction models providing […]

November 16, 2023

Study: QES-Fire: a dynamically coupled fast-response wildfire model

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Abstract: A microscale wildfire model, QES-Fire, that dynamically couples the fire front to microscale winds was developed using a simplified physics rate of spread (ROS) model, a kinematic plume-rise model and a mass-consistent wind solver. The model is three-dimensional and couples fire heat fluxes to the wind field while being more computationally efficient than other […]

November 16, 2023

Study: Fast Fire Simulations Over Idealized Terrain Using QES-Fire

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Abstract: The significant increase in the number of wildfires in the western United States is becoming a larger threat to human health and infrastructure. It is estimated that in 2018, wildfires cost the US $27.7 billion in capital losses and $32.2 billion in health costs. Prediction of wildfire spread rates and patterns are important for fire prevention […]

November 16, 2023

Study: Adaptation of QES-Fire, a dynamically coupled fast response wildfire model for heterogeneous environments

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Abstract: Background: Modelling of fire front progression is challenging due to the large range of spatial and temporal scales involved in the interactions between the atmosphere and fire fronts. Further modelling complications arise when heterogeneous terrain and fuels are considered. Aims: The aim of this study was to create a new parameterisation for wildfire-induced winds that accounts […]

November 16, 2023

Study: Measurements from inside a thunderstorm driven by wildfire: The 2019 FIREX-AQ field experiment

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Abstract: The 2019 Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) field experiment obtained a diverse set of in situ and remotely sensed measurements before and during a pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) event over the Williams Flats fire in Washington State. This unique dataset confirms that pyroCb activity is an efficient vertical smoke transport […]

November 15, 2023

Study: Using geographic information to analyze wildland firefighter situational awareness: Impacts of spatial resolution on visibility assessment

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Abstract: Wildland firefighters must be able to maintain situational awareness to ensure their safety. Crew members, including lookouts and crew building handlines, rely on visibility to assess risk and communicate changing conditions. Geographic information systems and remote sensing offer potential solutions for characterizing visibility using models incorporating terrain and vegetation height. Visibility can be assessed […]

November 15, 2023

Study: Using airborne lidar and machine learning to predict visibility across diverse vegetation and terrain conditions

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Abstract: Visibility analyses, used in many disciplines, rely on viewshed algorithms that map locations visible to an observer based on a given surface model. Mapping continuous visibility over broad extents is uncommon due to extreme computational expense. This study introduces a novel method for spatially-exhaustive visibility mapping using airborne lidar and random forests that requires […]

November 15, 2023