The
Atmosphere and Fire Interactions Research and Engineering
(AirFIRE) Team is part of the Managing Disturbance Regimes
Program of the Pacific Northwest Research Station and is
located at the Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory
in Seattle,
Washington.
Our team includes meteorologists, climatologists, air quality
engineers, computer scien-tists, and other professionals.
Our primary focus is to understand the role of weather and
climate in ecological disturbance and develop decision tools
for ecosystem management, fire operations, planning, and
smoke management. We undertake studies throughout the United
States and parts of Mexico and Canada.
![Potential for smoke to ventilate away from a fire on an October morning. From AirFire's Ventilation Climate System.](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20090514084524im_/http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/local-resources/images/vcis.jpg) Potential
for smoke to ventilate away from a fire on an October morning.
From AirFire's Ventilation Climate System. | |
AirFIRE's interdisciplinary
group of scientists and professionals direct their skills in
these emphasis areas:
Mesoscale Meteorology
This midscale knowledge of weather systems helps bridge the temporal and spatial
gap between regional scales to local scales, providing decision support for
fire operations, planning, and ecosystem disturbance management, and establishing
studies to measure and monitor elements of weather, smoke, and fuel moisture.
Air Quality Engineering
Using both climate and mesoscale
weather information, integrated with information about
fuels, combustion, and emissions, this area of study provides
decision
support for managing smoke from fires and impacts to wildland
areas from other sources of pollution.
Climate Dynamics
Providing decision support for fire-resource allocations
and ecosystem disturbance management, we develop knowledge
about climate, its forcing functions, and
impacts to learn and describe its variability at seasonal to decadal temporal
scales
and regional to continental spatial scales.
Integrative Atmospheres
Using the atmosphere as an integrator
of ecological and combustion processes that occur on the
land at multiple scales to develop integrative solutions
to multivariate problems and decision support tools for managing
ecosystem disturbances and their effects.
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