About the Atmosphere and Fire Interactions
Research and Engineering (AirFire) Team
(PDF VERSION)

MISSION 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.		ACTING TEAM LEADER Sim Larkin Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory 400 North 34th Street, Suite 201 Seattle, WA 98103 Phone: (206) 732-7849 larkin@fs.fed.us
Preparing to measure the vertical concentration of smoke from a wildand fire with instruments mounted on a tethered balloon.	ABOUT US 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 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.
TEAM MEMBERS Miriam L. Rorig Dr. Robert Solomon Mark Moore Chris Frederick	Dr. Narasimhan 'Sim' Larkin Jeanne Hoadley Caitlin Burgess Candace Berg Dylan Myers more info...
	RESEARCH AREAS AirFIRE's interdisciplinary group of scientists and professionals direct their skills in these emphasis areas:
Automated measurement of smoke and weather near a prescribed fire.	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.	Smoke from the 2003 Quartz Mountain wildfire complex, the first wildfire in the AirFire BlueSky smoke dispersion modeling system.
Potential for smoke to ventilate away from a fire on an October morning. From AirFire's Ventilation Climate System.	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.	Probes measuring moisture flux in duff at the base of a tree.