Join us with Craig B. Clements, PhD on Thursday, April 22 at 5:00pm (PDT) covering fire-atmosphere interactions and dynamics.
Extreme fire behavior has been observed frequently during recent wildfires in the Western US, yet there is still limited understanding of the role of plume dynamics on fire spread. The Rapid Deployments to Wildfires Experiment (RaDFIRE) was the first coordinated meteorological field campaign dedicated to observing fire-atmosphere interactions during large active wildfires to better understand extreme fire behavior. Using a sophisticated suite of instruments, the field campaign sampled 26 wildfires from 2013-2018 in California and Idaho. While observations of active wildfires have shed light on processes associated with fire-atmosphere interactions, data collected from a small-scale and comprehensive field experiment (FireFlux2) provide context on the local processes responsible for fire spread that are difficult to observe when sampling large wildfires. Collectively, the RaDFIRE field campaign and FireFlux2 observations highlight the range of phenomena associated with fire-atmosphere interactions, especially plume dynamics, and will provide a valuable data set for the fire behavior modeling communities.
Craig B. Clements, PhD
Dr. Craig Clements is a Professor of Meteorology at San José State University and Director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center. He leads research on fire weather, extreme fire behavior, fire-atmosphere interactions, and conducting wildland fire field experiments. Dr. Clements has over 20 years of experience in meteorological field observations and teaches courses in Fire Weather, Wildfire Science, Mountain Meteorology, Climate Change, and Meteorological Instrumentation. He received his PhD in Geophysics from the University of Houston, his MS in Meteorology from the University of Utah, and a BS degree in Geography from the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2012, Dr. Clements received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award for his research on wildfire dynamics and fire weather. His current research focuses on obtaining meteorological measurements using state-of-the-art Mobile Atmospheric Profiling Systems such as Doppler Lidar and Radar at active wildfires in the western US and his research has been featured in PBS NOVA, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Time, CNN, and Scientific American.
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