An Interview with Atmospheric Researcher, Kyle Hilburn
Kyle Hilburn, M.A. is an atmospheric researcher and research associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University. He specializes in the use of technology to study natural disasters, such as wildfires.
Theresa Nair: Thank you for joining us today for this installment of The Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Theresa Nair, a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. I'd like to welcome with us atmospheric researcher, Kyle Hilburn, who is a research associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University. Kyle has a Bachelor's Degree in Atmospheric Science from the University Of North Dakota and a Master's Degree in Meteorology from Florida State University. He was recently a presenter at NASA's Earth Science Applications Week, where he discussed the most recent breakthroughs in the use of NASA satellites to assist emergency responders in tracking the directionality and impact of fires. Thank you so much for joining us today. Before we get started, can you please tell us a little bit more about yourself and what made you interested in studying meteorology?
Kyle Hilburn: Thank you, Theresa. It's my pleasure to be here with you today. Growing up in Minnesota, I was fascinated by the weather for as long as I can remember. Minnesota has plenty of crazy weather to observe. I will admit that as a young child, I was afraid of loud noises. And so, thunder caused me distress. Some of my childhood interest in lightning was motivated by that. Even though I couldn't control it, I could at least understand it. And that helped me deal with the stress more effectively. I find it incredible that despite millennia of meteorological observations by humans, we are still learning new things about the weather.
For example, when I was in high school, the first photographic documentation of sprites was captured, which are electrical discharges from the tops of thunderstorm clouds. There are undoubtedly many new discoveries still to be made in meteorology. What makes new discoveries possible are advances in technology for observing the atmosphere. And while the public may joke about the accuracy of weather forecasts, there have been steady improvements in weather forecasts over the last 30 years, coming from increased computational power, more sophisticated weather models, and more observations.
It wasn't until I was living in Northern California that I had personal experiences with wildfire, and I realized its important role in the Earth atmosphere system. The growth rate of wildfires rivals that of thunderstorms. The first fire I witnessed relatively up close was the Valley Fire in 2015. It grew from 10,000 acres in the first six hours and 50,000 acres in the first 24 hours. Within two weeks, it had burned 76,000 acres. When fires become large enough and hot enough, they even begin to create their own weather, capturing the physical coupling between fires and the weather is an important theme in my current research.
Theresa Nair: That's incredible. I mean, I think sometimes we don't realize how quickly fires can spread. Some of the comparisons that you're giving us are amazing. We don't realize that it can spread even faster than a storm.
Many of our audience members are in the Pacific Northwest where wildfires are becoming a growing concern. Since the time you began researching atmospheric behavior, are you noticing any significant changes to wildfires, either in frequency or behavior?
Kyle Hilburn: Yes. What I've observed and what multiple studies confirm is that wildfires are becoming more frequent, they're growing larger, they're exhibiting more extreme fire behavior, and the fire season has gotten longer. And with population growth in what's called the wildland-urban interface, there are more people with greater exposure to wildfire risks. And it's not just droughts and fires that are becoming more frequent and more extreme, but heavy precipitation seems to be becoming more common as well.
For example, the six 1-in-1,000-year precipitation events that occurred in August in the United States or the recent flooding in Pakistan. This leads to the concept of cascading natural hazards, where heavy precipitation falling after a fire can cause erosion, debris flow, and have impacts on watershed, ecology, and water quality. This recently occurred with tropical storm Kay over Southern California. This cycle of drought, fire and flood is surprisingly common. And the National Weather Service actively monitors for these situations.
Throughout most of my career, the concept of attributing extreme weather events to climate change was considered impossible or at least dubious science. However, with advances in computing power, one can now simulate extreme events with and without the human influence on the climate and thus attribute those events to climate change with some level of confidence. This attribution is being performed almost in real time today.
Theresa Nair: That's great. Yeah, I think those types of models are important for answering that question of whether we are affecting the atmosphere or not. In your recent presentation for NASA's Earth Science Application Week, you discussed extreme fire behavior and how some fires are large enough to create their own weather. I know you mentioned it a few minutes ago also in this interview. I was wondering if you could give us some examples of that and discussed what types of phenomenon you observe.
Kyle Hilburn: A primary example is called a “pyrocumulonimbus” cloud, which is a type of thunderstorm that gets its buoyancy from a heat source, such as a wildfire. This type of cloud has only been widely recognized in meteorology in the last 24 years. There are even examples of pyrocumulonimbus clouds that get strong enough to produce lightning that ignite new fires, such as the pyrocumulonimbus cloud created by the Mallard Fire in Texas. Strong winds cause extreme fire behavior as we saw with the Marshall Fire in Boulder, Colorado. This was just a grass fire, but with winds stronger than 100 miles per hour, this fire was able to get out of control and enter an urban area causing so much destruction. People who thought they live far from the wildland-urban interface found out they are more vulnerable to wildfire risk than they thought. The Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, California in 2017 burned from Calistoga to Santa Rosa in just three hours’ time, propelled by very strong Diablo winds. Those winds are strongest along ridge-tops and created tendrils of fire that spread down into the valleys and neighborhoods, reaching within half a mile from my house.
The other ingredient in extreme fire behavior is heavy fuel loading, where the term fuel dispassionately refers to trees, shrubs and grasses. Drought, historical forest management practices, and pernicious species have played roles in creating the dead fuel conditions that we find ourselves with today.
In Lauren Johnson's interview on environmental justice, she described Native American forest practices of thinning trees to control fires. That practice is now referred to as a prescribed burn. Although New Mexico, this year, we witnessed a tragedy when a prescribed burn got out of control and became the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire, the largest in New Mexico history. The goal of my research is to use sophisticated weather models to provide improved decision support tools for prescribed burns and wildfires.
Theresa Nair: That's really interesting. There's actually a couple follow ups I think I'd like to ask you on that. So with these weather systems that develop in fires, are some of the tools that are being developed able to begin predicting those?
Kyle Hilburn: Yes, absolutely. We're able to put together all of the physical processes. And a lot of these have been understood for some time, but it's about having the computing power to be able to run these models fast enough to provide the information to people in the field, dealing with the fire.
Theresa Nair: Okay, and one other thing. You had mentioned the benefits of controlled burns, but then also the risk if it gets out of control. Given the risk of it getting out of control, does it seem like it's better in general to do the controlled burn or is it maybe different in different circumstances?
Kyle Hilburn: Yeah. I'm not a forest ecologist, but my understanding is that in general, controlled burns are an effective practice for controlling fuel-loads in forests.
Theresa Nair: Okay, great. In your presentation, I did attend your NASA presentation, you were discussing the most recent applications for using satellites to assist in responding to fires. Could you tell us about the developments in that area and how it differs from previous methods that were used to track the directionality and impact of fires?
Kyle Hilburn: Satellite remote sensing has been used to detect thermal signatures of active wildfires for over 20 years. Recent developments have improved the spatial and temporal resolution of the observations. For example, currently, the highest resolution satellite sensor with publicly available data has pixels that are 30 acres in area. However, that satellite is on a low Earth orbiting satellite, about 500 miles up, which only observes a given location twice per day. In contrast, geostationary satellites currently provide updates as fast as 30 seconds, but because they're so much farther from Earth, 22,000 miles up, they have pixels that are 1,000 acres in area.
So, part of my research concerns combining these observations from different sensors to get the best of both approaches. Over the coming decades, we will get new sensors and satellites with even finer spatial resolution and faster temporal refresh. These are being designed right now. While small satellite constellations and unmanned aerial vehicles will offer new observing approaches.
The other major development is how we forecast fires. Older models treat fire as an uncoupled system where you have wind blowing over a fire and they use simple assumptions to predict the fire spread based on the wind, but in those models, the fire does not in turn affect the winds. In my research, we're using a fully coupled model. Its name is WRF-SFIRE, which has physical processes in the atmosphere, the fire, and the vegetation coupled together and interact as they do in the real world. This is the only way that you can have fire that creates its own weather. Examples of fire atmosphere interactions include fire-induced winds that can further dry fuels and smoke shading that could inhibit air mixing. Uncoupled models do not represent those types of physical connections. I discussed more technical details about physical processes of WRF-SFIRE in my NASA Earth Science Applications Week presentation, and I've provided the link. (Kyle’s presentation starts 1 hour 32 minutes in.)
Theresa Nair: That's great. Thank you. And that sounds like incredible research being able to combine all of those different factors and get more accurate predictions about how the fire will actually behave. Are these recent developments in the use of satellite data and the work you've been talking about, are they solely intended for the use of professionals and disaster responders, or is this knowledge that's available to the general public?
Kyle Hilburn: I would encourage the general public, not to attempt to interpret forecasts from fire models for the same reason your doctor encourages you not to obsess on WebMD. You need to be a trained meteorologist to be able to understand the characteristics of the particular forecast system in order to understand what those forecasts mean. On the other hand, there are websites that provide information on fires, smoke, and weather that are suitable for the public, and I'll provide you links. You should also look for information at your state and local levels to get the information that is most specific to you.
Theresa Nair: That is great. And we will be linking to all the resources that Kyle's talking about in the transcribed interview below. So if you're watching this interview or if you're on the podcast listening to it, there was a transcription available that we'll have all of the links that he's discussing. Let's talk for a little bit about the relationship between wildfires and mental health. You have extensive experience dealing with wildfires, both from a personal perspective and a professional perspective. When people find out that they may potentially be in the path of a wildfire or that they're in the general proximity of a fire, what steps do you believe would be the most helpful in dealing with the anxiety that might arise from that situation?
Kyle Hilburn: Well, recognize that a fire doesn't need to be particularly close to cause major impacts on life and various impacts can last days to weeks to months. Even when a fire is 30 miles away, its impacts can make it feel very close. The smoke from a nearby fire can produce a suffocating sensation in a matter of seconds to minutes, which is anxiety provoking. The sky can darken, turning day into night and falling ash can produce an “end of the world” feeling. The smoke can make outdoor exercise impossible, which removes a potential coping mechanism, and it can trigger PTSD in people who have lived through previous fires. Having to leave everything behind at a moment's notice, not knowing what you'll come back to is incredibly stressful. And the aftermath of a fire in an urban setting looks like images from a war.
I've experienced living near fires in Santa Rosa, California, and Fort Collins, Colorado. The Cameron Peak Fire near Fort Collins started in August 2020, and it wasn't 100% contained until December. Fortunately, I was not directly in harm's way with any of these fires, but I still experienced some anxiety. The thing that produced the most anxiety for me was the lack of specific up-to-the-minute information given how fast conditions can change. While messages go out from emergency managers to people currently in evacuation zones, being close to, but not in an evacuation zone can be frustrating because it is hard to get the hyperlocal up-to-date information you want.
So, when confronted by wildfire hazards, one way to deal with the anxiety is practicing mindfulness by which I mean observing your environment and your thoughts about it. Some questions you can ask yourself, is the smoke aloft, or is it near the surface? That can make a big difference in terms of impacts on whether your air quality is healthy or not. How dense is the smoke visually? What is the color of the smoke and how does it affect your perception of the sun or the moon? What does the smoke smell like? Is it spicy and pungent like fresh wildfire smoke, or is the smell more muted? Indicating the smoke has traveled some distance. Is there falling ash? What is the wind direction?
By remaining mindful, you can avoid black and white thinking about the fire. You can observe that its impacts vary from day to day and over the daily cycle. And you can see that like everything, it comes, and it goes. Emergency managers also recommend staying observant in wildfire conditions, which they call maintaining situational awareness. So, staying aware has benefits both to your psychological state and your physical safety.
Another strategy for dealing with the anxiety, turn your focus outwards and practice gratitude for the wildland fire crews responding to the fire incident. Wildland firefighters work extremely hard, and they deserve our appreciation and support. Also, there may be evacuees who need support, but please listen to your local officials and make sure you don't get in the way of their response efforts.
One issue I've experienced during fires is obsession over the latest observations. I found I have to ask myself, is there really any new information? And, when do I expect new information? To keep myself from spiraling into an obsessive-compulsive cycle of refreshing websites repeatedly when fires are nearby. Finally, preparing for wildfire hazards can give you comfort and can make a big difference when the worst does happen. So, I've provided links from Ready.gov, CAL FIRE, and the Red Cross, discussing steps you can take to be prepared.
Theresa Nair: That's great. And I think we've probably all been in situations where you're repeatedly refreshing that website, trying to get the latest news. Following up on that. You mentioned the importance of not only staying up to date with those resources, but also your own observational skills, keeping an eye out for things, like whether the smoke is closer to the ground or further up, whether there's ash falling from the sky. If somebody notices that their situation is changing, but maybe there aren't any alerts yet saying to evacuate, should they kind of follow their observational signs that they've observed or should they wait to receive specific instructions from authorities?
Kyle Hilburn: That's a difficult question and it will depend on your own personal feelings about the situation. Things like ash can be transported for many, many miles, and aren't necessarily an indicator that you're in imminent danger. I would definitely recommend that people listen to their state and local authorities and to emergency managers. They will let you know if there is an immediate risk to your safety. But if you're uncomfortable, you can make the choice to leave at any point, if that makes you feel better.
Theresa Nair: That's true. It never hurts to be more cautious, right? Are there any further developments in tracking or responding to wildfires that you think might be helpful for our audience to know about? And are there specific tools you would recommend for those who are concerned about fires in their area?
Kyle Hilburn: Yes, I would recommend four websites. First is the AirNow website, which provides information about air quality. In particular, the quantity called PM 2.5, which measures the concentration of particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers, which is a key indicator of the severity of wildfire smoke. And whether it's healthy to be outside. Keep in mind that air quality sensors represent the conditions at a specific point and conditions can vary dramatically with your location. Second is the InciWeb website, which provides information on active wildfire incidents for the United States. You can click on specific incidents and read more information about the current situation and the outlook.
Third is the CIRA SLIDER website, CIRA is where I'm located, which provides access to satellite imagery of fires. When you go to that site, it defaults to the GeoColor product, which is very good for looking at smoke plumes during the daytime, because smoke generally has a darker color than clouds. Under “Product”, you can select fire temperature or natural color fire, and then zoom in on your location. There are color bars at the bottom of the image that tell you what each color means. Under add map, you can add cities, roads, and county boundaries, and other information to see where the fire is located. Keep in mind that clouds and even heavy smoke can obscure the heat signatures from fires. And finally, the National Weather Service at weather.gov is an excellent resource for the official weather forecast coming from human experts with local knowledge and to learn whether there are any watches or warnings for your area.
Theresa Nair: This is some great recommendations. Thank you. And once again, for our audience, we will provide links for all of those in the description. So if you didn't quite catch that, you can just look at that on the transcript and they'll be there. As an atmospheric researcher who specializes in creating weather prediction models, do you have any other parting words of advice or anything else you'd like to share with our listeners?
Kyle Hilburn: Well, nature is very restorative for the soul. Florence Williams described nature therapy, such as forest bathing in her interview. And so it is extremely distressing to see nature burning down, but we must remember that fire exists as part of a natural duality between creation and destruction. There are artists such as Erika Osborne, who are exploring this duality and human's relationships with fire. But the increasing rate of changes in our environment is very distressing and climate change anxiety is real. And so, I've provided a link discussing that. Thank you again, Theresa, for this opportunity to discuss managing wildfire anxiety.
Theresa Nair: Thank you so much for speaking with me today and taking the time to participate in our interview series.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.