

Forest Service had planned to set in southern Utah at the end of the month or in early November.īut when fires started erupting across California in early October, Clements and his team mobilized. Originally, SJSU scientists were going to deploy the radar for the first time to study a large, controlled burn that the U.S. Disaster Preparedness Guide: Tornadoes “ To visualize how much of a leap in resolution the new tool represents, Lareau made the analogy to images of Pluto captured before and after NASA’s 2015 New Horizons flyby mission. “It’s night and day,” says Neil Lareau, a fire weather researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno who helped put together a proposal for this radar system while he was a professor at SJSU. This could lead to better tools for tracking and forecasting fires, thereby reducing damage and casualties.Īnd because the radar is mounted on a truck, the scientists working with the Fire Weather Research Laboratory can bring it out to an active fire and start collecting information within minutes of arriving on the scene. Researchers hope the system will yield new insights into the inner structure and evolution of the most dangerous blazes. Disaster Preparedness Guide: Earthquakes “ Scientists with San Jose State University’s Fire Weather Research Laboratory have been deploying to the blazes, taking advantage of the dire fire weather to test an experimental Doppler radar capable of peering into wildfire smoke plumes at unprecedented resolution. Fierce, fast-moving wildfires exploded up and down the state during October, prompting utilities to shut off power to millions and forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate.īut while tens of thousands fled the flames, there are a handful of researchers who have driven towards them. California has been caught in the midst of a fiery assault fueled by historically powerful winds, humidity levels stuck in the single digits, and the effects of long-term climate change.
