Pacific Northwest Research Station

ABOUT US

RESEARCH AREAS

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.

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.

Research Programs
Detailed information about our research programs.