News

In an October 1st article in the Washington Post, AirUCI grad student Audrey Odwuor (Randerson group) is quoted on her study into the 2021 KNP fire and its destructiveness. Using a mobile laboratory, the team analyzed smoke during the fire and looked for radiocarbon signatures associated with large fuel sources. Old, large-diameter fuels like fallen logs drove the conflagration, causing it to burn at a higher intensity than other fuel sources such as pine needles or leaf litter.  Read the article

AirUCI grad student Audrey Odwuor (Randerson group) took the lead on a study published in Environmental Research Letters determining that one of the chief fuels of wildfires in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains is the decades-old remains of large trees. "Our findings support the idea that large-diameter fuel build-up is a strong contributor to fire severity," said Audrey.  She drove a mobile laboratory to King's Canyon National Park during the 2021 KNP Complex Fire to take measurements and samples.  These were analyzed for their radiocarbon content at UCI’s W.M. Keck Accelerator Mass Spectrometer facility with co-author and AirUCI faculty Claudia Czimczik.  "The idea is that because we can’t control the climate, we can only do our best to manage the fuels," said Audrey.  Read the article

AirUCI faculty Annmarie Carlton is featured in a KUNC radio segment discussing how increasing wildfire smoke is cancelling out progress made in improving air quality.  “The gestalt is that wildfires in the U.S. are increasing in terms of frequency, intensity, duration, acres burned, and that's negatively impacting air quality in the United States,” said Annmarie. 

Wildfire smoke releases a tiny particulate matter called PM 2.5. It contributes to air pollution, as well as increases health risks like cancer and heart attacks.  “You can breathe (those particles) in very deeply to these little sacs at the end of your lungs called the alveoli, and that's where the blood-air exchange happens,” she said. “That's what makes this sized particle such a health hazard.”  Between 2000 and 2016, average annual PM 2.5 levels dropped in most states, largely due to advances made under the Clean Air Act. But since 2016, wildfire smoke has affected PM 2.5 trends in three-fourths of the United States. Additionally, that smoke has reversed 25% of the air quality progress made since 2000.  Hear the broadcast

AirUCI faculty Jane Baldwin is quoted in a Grist article about keeping cool as global temperatures rise.  Perspiration cools the body with differences in efficiency depending on humidity in the air.  Generally it's been observed that higher levels of  humidity, temperature, and sunlight cause greater stress to the human body.  Still, there’s debate over how much humidity matters in health outcomes — it isn’t showing up as a key driver of deaths in real-world epidemiological data as expected.  Jane recently co-authored a study exploring this discrepancy. One explanation could be that epidemiological data tends to come from cooler parts of the world, like Europe and the United States, whereas data is limited from tropical countries like India, Ghana, and Brazil, where the link between humidity and death would likely be strongest. Nailing down an answer to this question would help scientists make more accurate predictions about how climate change will affect health, Jane said.   Read the article