Sponsors

Craig Clements, San Jose State University, United States of America

 

Short Biography: Dr. Craig Clements is Professor and Chair in the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San José State University and Director of the National Science Foundation I/UCRC Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center. He leads research on fire weather, extreme fire behavior, fire-atmosphere interactions, and conducting wildfire field experiments. Dr. Clements 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. His current research focuses on conducting field experiments in the fire environment using state-of-the-art mobile Doppler Lidar and Radar at active wildfires and his research has been featured in PBS NOVA, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Time, CNN, and Scientific American. 

Short Summary: This lecture will cover topics of fire-induced winds and turbulence at multiple scales in the wildfire environment. Particularly, this course will cover how we can measure these phenomena in the field during both small scale field experiments and during large wildfires that are associated with pyrocumulonimbus development and in regions of complex terrain. We will discuss the fire front passage and associated changes in temperature, three-dimensional velocity fields, and pressure, and how processes influence fire behavior. At the large scale we will examine observations of strong updrafts and downdrafts in pyroCb and microphysics of pyroCu/Cb including plume dynamics and structures.