Lead: University of Utah PI(s): William Anderegg, Divya Chandrasekhar, John Lin, Fielding Norton Key Partners: NSF Futures Engine in the Southwest; U.S.-Canada Center on Climate-Resilient Western Interconnected Grid; Utah Department of Public Safety, Division of Emergency Management; Utah Division of Forestry, Fire & State Lands; WCF Insurance; InnSure; Park City Depts of Planning and Environmental […]
Read MoreAbstract: 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 […]
Read MoreAbstract: 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. […]
Read MoreAbstract: 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, […]
Read MoreThe 2nd annual 24-hour Wilkes Climate Solutions Hackathon will be January 26~27, 2024, at the Crocker Science Center and virtual! All U students are invited for this fun and intensive problem-solving competition to put their passion, knowledge and teamwork toward achieving climate solutions. Thousands of dollars in cash prizes will be awarded to the top […]
Read MoreAbstract: 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 […]
Read MoreAbstract: 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 […]
Read MoreAbstract: 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 […]
Read MoreAbstract: 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 […]
Read MoreAbstract: 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 […]
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