Tirtha Banerjee, Ph.D.
Tirtha Banerjee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine. He received his B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from Jadavpur University (Calcutta, India) in 2011 and a Ph.D. in Environmental Science from Duke University (Durham, NC, USA) in 2015. After conducting postdoctoral research at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany and Los Alamos National Lab (NM, USA) as an atmospheric scientist, he joined UC Irvine in the fall of 2019.
Research in the Boundary Layers and Turbulence (BLT) Lab led by Banerjee studies wildfires, environmental flows, and land atmosphere interaction using a range of theoretical, numerical, and experimental techniques. He leads the NSF-funded international consortium on wildfires, called iFireNet, and the UCOP-funded SPARx project aimed at transforming prescribed fire practices for California.
Research Interests
Exchange of scalar (such as carbon dioxide, heat or trace gasses) momentum and energy between the atmosphere and the elements of the ecosystem such as land, vegetation and water is controlled by turbulence or multi-scale organized eddy motions. Our core research interest lies in identifying the governing laws of such interactions across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales using a variety of theoretical, numerical and experimental tools.
Expertise
Wildfire Land Climate
Contact
“Fire suppression activities in the past few decades in North America has led to higher fuel accumulations, which coupled with shifting hydroclimatic patterns and proliferation of WUI areas, has led to an increase in frequency and severity of wildland fires. Prescribed fires and fuel treatments such as mechanical thinning are deemed to be effective tools to manage fuel loads and establish a higher degree of control over landscape management and restoration against catastrophic megafires. However, assessing the effectiveness of fuel treatments is rendered complicated due to several factors such as wind, fuel moisture and fire-atmospheric interactions at the fine scales.
The present work explores these issues by using physics-based simulations and data analysis, while varying the degrees of fuel treatments and fuel moisture, as observed during different stages of fuel management. The role of fine scale micrometeorological features on wildland fire dynamics will also be discussed.Mapping, modeling, and mitigating wildland fire risk: A micrometeorological perspective.”