About the AirFire Team


AirFire is focused on understanding the role of weather and climate in ecological disturbance and develops decision tools for ecosystem management, fire operations, planning and smoke management.

	The AirFire Team is part of the Managing Distrubance Regimes Program of the Pacific Northwest Research Station aand located at the Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory in Seattle, Washington. Our team includes meteorologists, climatologists, air quality engineers, computer scientists, 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.



This midscale knowledge of weather systems helps bridge the temporal and spatial gap between regional scales to local scales, providing decision suport for fire operations, planning, and ecosystem disturbance management, and establishing studies to measure and monitor elements of weather, smoke and fuel moisture.


	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.


Developing 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.


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.