Shane Coffield, a first year Ph.D. student in Earth System Science, was awarded a 2018 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Shane proposes to work on fire prediction and participates in the Machine Learning in Physical Sciences (MAPS) NSF training program. Congratulations to Shane for this prestigious award!
Ph.D. and postdoctoral scholar positions available in the Randerson lab in 2018
I am looking to hire 1-2 Ph.D. students and 1-2 postdoctoral scholars in my laboratory during 2018 and 2019.
For Ph.D. students, I am particularly interested in working with students on research topics related to the global carbon cycle and analysis of land cover change using land surface modeling and remote sensing techniques.
For postdoctoral scholars, I plan to hire someone in the area of high resolution terrestrial remote sensing. I also wish to hire someone interested in studying global carbon and water cycles using earth system modeling and data science approaches.
I particularly encourage women and underrepresented minority candidates to contact me and apply for these positions!
Yang Chen’s paper in Nature Climate Change describes predictable tropics-wide fire response during El Nino
In a paper published in November of 2017, Dr. Yang Chen describes how ocean teleconnections during El Nino create a predictable pattern of drought and fire across different tropical continents. The work draws upon the +20 year record of burned area and fire emissions developed by researchers working on the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED). Tropical forest fires more than doubled during El Nino events, with burning in equatorial Asia during autumn (Sept-Oct.) followed by elevated fire emissions in Southeast Asia, northern South America, and Central America during winter and spring, and the southern Amazon during the following summer. Since fire responses unfold in a predictable cascade, this information may improve seasonal forecasting systems for fire risk, and allow for improvements in ecosystem management. Lead times were long in the southern Amazon where land-atmosphere moisture coupling introduced time delays between soil moisture anomalies and surface humidity responses, and in Australia, where precipitation impacts on fuel amount added an additional time delay between El Nino onset and decreases in fire activity. The paper was discussed in a article by Cosmos Magazine.
Gabe Kooperman teaching his first class at University of Georgia
Congratulations to Gabriel Kooperman on his recent move to University of Georgia for a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography! Gabe was a postdoctoral scholar at UCI, first in the laboratory of Michael Pritchard, and then with James Randerson. Gabe studies the influence of climate change on weather extremes using global climate models. He is an expert in understanding how the intensity and frequency of precipitation will change in response to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
A human-driven decline in global burned area- Niels Andela’s paper published this week in Science
In a paper published this week as a research article in the journal Science, Niels Andela and coauthors show that global burned has declined by nearly a quarter over the past two decades. The loss of fire was greatest in savanna and grassland ecosystems across northern Africa, the Eurasian steppe, Latin and South America, and some areas of Southeast Asia and Australia. Taking fire as an indicator of ecosystem health, the rapid decline in burning points to a profound, human-driven transformation of savanna and grassland ecosystems over the past 20 years. The authors show that significant increases in population, livestock density and cropland areas are important contributors to the decline in fire activity, and that the changes in fire are modifying atmospheric composition and ecosystem structure. State-of-the-art prognostic fire models could not reproduce the magnitude of the declining trends, suggesting that more research is needed to understand how land use change modified fire dynamics. Niels is a UCI postdoctoral scholar and NASA research scientist who works at Goddard Space Flight Center. He is co-advised by Douglas Morton and Jim Randerson. News reports about the study include articles in the Washington Post and Popular Science. NASA and UC Irvine released additional information about the study.
Figure caption: Expansion of crop production has fragmented many savanna landscapes, restricting fires to remaining patches of natural vegetation. This false-color Landsat8 image from the Brazilian Cerrado shows an actively burning fire in a fragment of remaining savanna vegetation, surrounded by agricultural fields. Fire scars from other recent burns appear maroon (Douglas Morton, NASA).
The study was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, NASA, and other sources. The data we used in the study can be found at:
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