As wildfires threaten much of the West during another hot and dry year, scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) are researching key aspects of these destructive events. Wildfire experts are available to discuss issues such as:

• Wildland fire behavior, and how local atmospheric conditions interact with conflagrations
• Smoke plumes, which affect air quality for hundreds or even thousands of miles downwind
• Improved prediction systems that can help firefighters anticipate wildfire risk as well as the movement and size of an active fire
• The potential influence of climate change on future fires

Ronnie Abolafia-Rosenzweig, NSF NCAR scientist
abolafia@ucar.edu
Abolafia-Rosenzweig is an expert in climate-fire relationships, researching connections between drought and fire hazard and the impacts of fire disturbance on the terrestrial water cycle. He uses statistical learning methods to better understand relationships between drought and fire and leverages computer models to improve predictions of the water cycle in fire-disturbed areas. 

Kelley Barsanti, NSF NCAR scientist
barsanti@ucar.edu
Barsanti is an expert on emissions and chemistry of organic compounds from wildfires. She uses a combination of smoke measurements and computer modeling to better understand fire emissions and associated pollution in the atmosphere. She is also working with scientists and stakeholders to develop a specialized database with a user-friendly web interface to make fire information more accessible and useful for a wide range of communities.

Rebecca Buchholz, NSF NCAR scientist
buchholz@ucar.edu
An atmospheric chemist who uses a range of measurements and computer modeling to analyze the impact of fire emissions on air quality, Buchholz led a recent study into the impacts of Pacific Northwest fires on air pollution patterns across North America. She is also interested in the year-to-year variability of wildfires, long-term fire trends, and the connection between climate variability and emissions.

Janice Coen, NSF NCAR scientist
janicec@ucar.edu
Coen is an internationally recognized expert on wildland fire behavior and the interaction between fires and local atmospheric conditions. She uses advanced weather-fire computer models and fire remote sensing data to gain new insights into wildfires (such as the factors leading to megafires, fire whirls, and pyrocumulus) and to forecast wildfire behavior. Her current work involves analyzing climate impacts on fire behavior, advancing forecasting techniques, and investigating fire spread in the wildland-urban interface. Highlights of her computer model visualizations of wildfires may be found here. 

John Fasullo, NSF NCAR scientist
fasullo@ucar.edu
Fasullo works to advance understanding of climate variability and change, using both computer models and observations. His research focuses on the influence of fire emissions on regional and global climate., as well as the potential impacts of climate change on wildfires.

Frank Flocke, NSF NCAR senior scientist
ffl@ucar.edu
Flocke is an atmospheric chemist and air quality expert who studies emissions from wildfires and their influence on air quality, both in the vicinity of fires and far downwind. He is a specialist in scientific instrumentation and atmospheric observations. In 2018, he was a principal investigator on a major field campaign, the Western Wildfire Experiment for Cloud Chemistry, Aerosol Absorption, and Nitrogen (WE-CAN), which measured the chemical components of plumes from fires in the northwestern United States.

Cenlin He, NSF NCAR scientist 
cenlinhe@ucar.edu
He studies the impacts of fire on air quality, land surface conditions, and terrestrial hydrology, as well as fire prediction and modeling. He recently co-authored a study that mapped wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires and quantified the increase of their growing threat, and another study that used machine learning techniques to predict fire-burned areas over the western U.S. using pre-fire hydroclimate conditions. In addition, he is leading several projects on understanding fire-drought-hydrology interactions over the western US. 

Rebecca Hornbrook, NSF NCAR scientist
rsh@ucar.edu
Hornbrook is an atmospheric chemist with expertise in the measurement of many of the gases emitted by wildfires. She has been involved in several airborne field campaigns that have studied smoke from wildfires, and she is interested in the air quality and health impacts that fires have on the regions affected by wildfire smoke.

Timothy Juliano, NSF NCAR scientist
tjuliano@ucar.edu
Juliano works on the NSF NCAR team that is developing modeling systems to improve predictions of wildfires, including the spread of active fires and the likelihood of ember spotting. A boundary layer meteorologist, he studies the often subtle ways that weather conditions and ground cover influence wildfire behavior. Juliano led a recent study that successfully applied a pair of advanced computer models to simulate the 2023 Lahaina Fire.

Jason Knievel, NSF NCAR scientist and deputy director, NSF NCAR National Security Applications Program
knievel@ucar.edu
Knievel is a meteorologist who uses computer models and observations to gain new insights into the influence of atmospheric conditions, ground cover, and terrain on wildfire behavior. He is among several leaders of NSF NCAR teams that are working to better predict the spread of wildfires, improve our understanding of how weather and wildfires influence each other, and explore how authorities from local to federal can better mitigate the negative effects of wildfires.

David Lawrence, NSF NCAR senior scientist and section head, NCAR Terrestrial Sciences
dlawren@ucar.edu
Lawrence specializes in using computer models to better understand interactions between land surfaces and climate change. He applies his modeling expertise to learn more about the long-term response of fires, both regionally and globally, to changes in climate and human development.

Seth McGinnis, NSF NCAR scientist
mcginnis@ucar.edu
McGinnis is a climate scientist whose work focuses on making climate simulation data useful to non-scientists. As part of a multi-institution convergent science project, he has contributed to research investigating the projected future effects of climate change on simultaneous large wildfires in the western United States and the impacts of such blazes on fire management.

Brett Palm, NSF NCAR scientist
bbpalm@ucar.edu
An atmospheric chemist, Palm studies wildfire emissions, focusing on how organic compounds and other particles and gases in a smoke plume evolve as they drift downwind in the atmosphere. He gains new insights into emissions by using mass spectrometers on research aircraft to measure the components of smoke plumes.

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