San Jose State has established the largest academic Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center in the U.S., garnering $6.1 million in federal funding this year.
The Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center was established in 2020, after a cluster hire of five tenure-track faculty members.
Craig Clements, meteorology professor and Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center director, said that was the largest cluster hire in wildfire science in U.S. history.
“There is a need for interdisciplinary approaches to wildfire science and so bringing an interdisciplinary team of faculty to SJSU addressed this need,” Clements said in an email. “We have the best wildfire modelers at SJSU and a leading wildfire social scientist.”
SJSU stated the center gained national recognition for its role and expertise in understanding and mitigating near-term wildfire risks in its July 13 news release.
Clements said the state and government funding, which was requested by Ash Kalra, Santa Clara County city councilmember, that the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center received is being used to purchase and advance its research facilities.
He said with the multi-million dollars in funding for the center, he plans on building out a fire lab in the engineering building, setting up advanced fire weather wind profiling networks, buying new infrared cameras and expanding the center’s high performance computing.
Robin McElhatton, assistant director of media relations, said in a Sept. 1 university blog post that the five professors hired by Clements specialize in fire ecology, fire and fluid dynamics, wildfire behavior modeling, wildfire remote sensing and wildfire management and policy.
Those professors each focus on their own research within the center, which includes: how people interact with messages around wildfire safety; mathematical modeling of how fires send out embers that start new fires; how the ecosystems change and how it affects the climatology of fires; and working with drones that go over fires to see how the spread changes at high resolutions.
Angel Farguell, a postdoctoral research associate at the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center, said the goal of the center is to take people from different disciplines and put them together with the same objective: researching wildfires.
“I’m very happy to be here, we have a lot of collaboration with different departments and disciplines so it’s very cool to be able to touch [on] so many topics around wildfire with experts,” Farguell said.
Farguell works with Adam Kochanski, wildfire meteorology assistant professor, on trying to predict where a fire may go using the WRF-SFIRE model, which models the interaction between wildfires and the atmosphere.
That two-coupled model showcases the interaction between fire, weather, fuel and smoke to forecast where a fire will move in the timeframe of hours.
Clements said that model is the most advanced wildfire prediction system in the world.
The model is used by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), NASA and the U.S. Forest Service during fire season, Clements said.
Patrick Brown, former assistant professor of meteorology and climate science, said the model is the most cutting-edge work done at the center.
“It’s been great to be a part of it because you get to interact with these people that have multiple perspectives and can bring a lot to the table,” Brown said.
He said previous wildfire models didn’t take the atmospheric interaction into account.
Brown said the WRF-SFIRE model lets you predict where a fire might go at a much higher resolution with more information.
Farguell said his current research focuses on improving the model to better estimate live fuel moisture, dead fuel moisture and gain a better understanding of the fire in real time.
This past fire season, the modeling division ran close to 50 forecasts of wildfires in California and Oregon, Farguell said.
“We are exactly in the middle between academia and industry. That’s a very nice spot because you can explore things,” he said. “You are not under pressure to have the best forecast in the world, you’re doing research after all.”
Brown, who stopped teaching at SJSU in May, has continued his research at the center to focus on the quantified role of climate change on the extreme risk of wildfire behavior.
Brown said with the success of the center, it feels rewarding to be able to contribute to an effort that could potentially save property and lives.
“It puts pressure on you because your research is going to inform real world decisions, of course that’s what you want, we don’t want to be doing research that nobody cares about and no one reads,” he said. “If we're going to put in a lot of work, we want it to actually help inform decisions.”
Brown said being located in California’s Silicon Valley has many benefits.
Graduate students that are interested in wildfire research come to this school to write their masters thesis on wildfire, he said.
Jeremy Benik, graduate research assistant, works with Farguell and Kochanski on the WRF-SFIRE model while pursuing his masters in meteorology.
“I’m proud to be a part of this, this is the best I could possibly get,” Benik said. “Let's say you’re studying law, this is like Harvard.”
Benik graduated from University of Nevada, Reno with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science.
He said the reason he started researching wildfires is because all the smoke from California wildfires would get pushed up to Nevada sparking his interest in the topic.
Farguell said students put so much effort in what they do because they are just scratching the surface of a world of research.
“They always surprise you somehow, I’m very grateful to have the students I have working with me,” Farguell said.
Graduate research assistant Kathleen Clough said being a part of Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center has given them the unique opportunity to go out to wildfires in California.
Last year, Clough and other students went out to the 2021 Dixie Fire.
The Dixie Fire started on July 13, 2021 and was an enormous wildfire that spread throughout Butte, Plumas, Lassen, Shasta and Tehama Counties in California.
The drought, combined with hot weather, strong winds and extremely dry vegetation resulted in the incredibly active wildfire behavior, according to the U.S. Incident Information System Dixie Fire webpage.
“It’s really nice to have that tie to the real world and what’s actually going on with a fire,” Clough said regarding her work on the Dixie Fire.
