AirFire Research Overview

Our 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.

Who We Are

The AirFire Team is part of the Managing Distrubance Regimes Program of the U.S. Forest Service 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 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.

Atmospheric Dynamics and Weather

The flow of the atmosphere and the properties of the air at different heights are among the strongest factors controlling wildland fires and the smoke they produce.  AirFire studies how the structure of the atmosphere, viewed on scales from about a mile to 100 miles influences fire and smoke in order to improve decision support tools for fire operations, planning, and  smoke management.

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Climate Change and Variability

AirFire is 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.

• ENSO Research
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Air Quality and Smoke

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.

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Integrated 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.

Types of research

AirFire ecompasses many types of research, including theoretical studies of fire weather and dynamics, data mining of historical climate information, numeric modeling of smoke and fire, and field observations to gather new insights and verify predictions.