Team Leader's Message

We're having a busy and productive year here at AirFire.  We're making good progress on a variety of Joint Fire Science Program projects as well as projects funded by NASA, South Lake Tahoe, and others.  Many of these projects focus on creating new tools for land and air quality managers - take a look at the Products & Status bar to the right to see what we have running now.  Other projects focus on basic science, discovery and exploration that will eventually lead to more and better tools. 

One of our biggest success stories this year is not a web tool or a particular scientific discovery.  The Team was awarded US Recovery Act funds last summer, which we have put to use improving our tools and science in support of fire and smoke management.  Part of the funds went into an agreement with the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences, preserving several jobs there and bolstering the Department's ability to provide us with state-of-the-art weather forecasts for the Pacific Northwest.  Another part of the funds is allowing our partners at Sonoma Technology, Inc. to expand and improve the BlueSky-based smoke management tools available on the web.  Yet another portion has allowed us, and will continue to allow us, to  hire undergraduate and graduate interns through the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities' National Intern Program.  These interns have worked on projects such as web page design; understanding convective processes associated with wildfires; mapping probabilities of large, dry lightning outbreaks; exploring the use of water tanks to study smoke plume entrainment; and comparing variations in smoke estimates based on various combinations of consumption and emissions models.

The roll-out of the various new tools and interfaces we've developed means that we need to train both new and old users on how to properly use and interpret what we have available.  We are working on web-based tutorials for some tools, as well as classroom training.  We will be offering a half-day training session at the 3rd Fuels and Fire Behavior Conference in Spokane, WA on October 25, as well as other, more regional training sessions during the Fall and Winter.  In the meantime, if you have questions about what we have available, we hope that you will call or email us.

In closing, I want to emphasize our team commitment to high quality science and tools.  We work every day to adapt science to tools, and to ensure that the science is robust.  Part of that means we strive to place our scientific work in the peer reviewed literature, where the broader scientific community, including our land and air quality management colleagues, can evaluate it and  hopefully improve it.  We have updated the tools and published some of our work in the last year, but we will be emphasizing the push to peer reviewed publications in the coming months so that users and colleagues can better understand what those tools really do - and really don't do. 

Brian Potter
AirFire Team Leader
July 28, 2010