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The Fastest and Most Complex Wildfire Spread Pathway: Firebrand Spotting
by Simona Dossi and Guillermo Rein, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College London Photo: Firebrand shower during the 2018 Delta Fire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, California, USA. Photo courtesy of Noah Berger/Associated Press (noahbergerphoto.com). Photo shows numerous airborne firebrands and flames on the grass appear to be ignited by the landing firebrands Wildfires pose […]
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Developing research impact and future collaborations on fire management with Indigenous peoples in Guyana
By Kayla de Freitas and Jay Mistry, Royal Holloway University of London Centre researchers Kayla de Freitas and Jay Mistry from Royal Holloway met with the South Rupununi District Council, Guyana to discuss how current and future research can feed into practical fire management activities. On the 17th December 2021, Kayla de Freitas and Jay […]
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Developing an ecosystem-centred fire framework: causes and consequences
Figure 1. Forest regrowth after wildfire. Victoria, Australia. Credit Neal Herbert By Natalie Sanders (Imperial College London) How do we disentangle extreme fire events resulting from climate change with natural wildfire regimes? And how might we model the interaction of climate and ecosystem properties, in order to better predict and manage wildfires? Part of the […]
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An introduction to wildfire ignition, fire spread, and fire suppression
Francesco Restuccia, Lecturer in Engineering at King’s College London, and Guillermo Rein, Professor of Fire Science at Imperial College London, discuss wildfire ignition, fire spread, and fire suppression. They look at problems such as the wildland urban interface (WUI), fire spread, fire suppression, ignition criteria, to have a better fundamental understanding of how these fires […]
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KCL researchers take flight in ‘SwathSense 2021’ project to improve the way Land Surface Temperature is measured
KCL researchers, including members of Leverhulme Wildfires, successfully carried out an airborne campaign last month – ‘SwathSense 2021’ – with the aim of improving the way land surface temperature is measured. Land surface temperature (LST) can be very different to air temperature and is a key parameter related to many Earth system processes, for example […]
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NCEO Researchers track effects of the devastating Western North America heatwave
NCEO Researchers, including Leverhulme Wildfires researchers at King’s College London, used European and American satellites to help contextualise the exceptional heatwave which has recently enveloped Western Canada and the North-Western United States. Read the article here Image: IMS land surface temperatures on 29th June 2021. Temperatures are in Kelvin
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Smoke increases fatigue in flying butterflies
Landscape fires burn across millions of square kilometres of Earth’s landscapes each year. Though each of these fires maybe individually small, the very large numbers of fires burning simultaneously can seriously degrade local and regional air quality by releasing a complex mixture of gases and aerosols. These smoke emissions may not only have significant effects […]
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Investigating fundamental wildfire drivers
by Alex Kuhn-Regnier Alex Kuhn-Regnier is a PhD student at Imperial College London based in the Department of Physics. He investigates wildfire models and how to improve the representation of the ecological impacts of future wildfire changes. My PhD began by asking the question “What are the fundamental drivers of wildfires?” Far from being […]
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KCL researchers in new 10-million-euro project to tackle forest fires in Europe
Image: A forest fire burning in Enskogen, as seen by Sentinel-2 on 16th July (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2018], processed by the Copernicus Support Office) King’s College London will be one of 39 partners from across the world involved in the new research project FirEUrisk, starting this month, which will develop a science-based strategy […]
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Spontaneous ignition of smouldering peat fires (and how to simulate them in the field)
Figure 1: Smouldering wildfire of a carbon-rich soil system in Las Tablas de Daimiel (Photo by Dr G Rein, 2009). Researchers at Imperial College Hazelab, including members of Leverhulme Wildfires, have recently published a new paper developing a multi-step reaction model to study the potential of peatland fires starting from self-heating ignition, in the International […]
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