T his summer proved to be a dangerous one in the tinder-dry forests of the southwest United States and Alaska . Winds play a critical role in fire spread, but a fire itself can modify local winds, helping it grow even more quickly. First results from this model were published in the May 1996 issue of the Journal of Applied Meteorology.
C lark specializes in using supercomputers to model small-scale atmospheric phenomena.
His work has analyzed severe thunderstorms, downslope windstorms, and the dynamics near fronts. Although forests vary in how they burn, the authors expect that their main findings will translate to a variety of settings. H ere are two animation sequences, each representing twelve minutes of model simulation. The first is an animation sequence of vertical cross section of buoyancy and the second of horizontal cross section of vertical velocity . M ost previous studies on fire and wind have assumed a straightforward relationship between large-scale winds and fire behavior.