Fire suppression activities in the past few decades in North America have led to higher fuel accumulations, which, coupled with shifting hydroclimatic patterns, have led to an increase in the frequency and severity of wildland fires. Prescribed fires and fuel treatments such as mechanical thinning are deemed to be effective tools to manage fuel loads and establish a higher degree of control over landscape management and restoration against catastrophic megafires. However, assessing the effectiveness of fuel treatments is complicated due to several factors such as wind, fuel moisture, and fire-atmospheric interactions at the fine scales. The present work explores these issues by using physics-based simulations and data analysis from novel experiments while varying the degrees of fuel treatments and fuel moisture, as observed during different stages of fuel management. Systematically varying these parameters yields widely different fire behavior patterns. Detailed analyses on turbulent heat and energy exchange are conducted to understand the fundamental processes governing varying regimes of fire intensity, fire spread, ember transport, and fuel consumption under different conditions of fuel moisture and treatment. The conclusions are generalized to highlight the importance of considering vegetation response to hydrometeorological events, coupled with fine-scale fire-atmosphere interactions while managing wildland fire behavior. On the other hand, wildland fires themselves are characterized by their own weather, which is driven by both shear- and buoyancy-driven turbulence. They also act as a local source for scalars, namely greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and water) and soot particles as resultants of the ignition process. In this talk, we will explore the complex turbulent dynamics of wildfire propagation using the tools of micrometeorology. Insights into the energetics of turbulent exchange processes during fire propagation will lead to a better understanding and improved models for wildland fire behavior.

Dr. Tirtha Banerjee is currently an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 2019. Prior to this, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Los Alamos NationalLaboratory as a Chick Keller and subsequently a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Banerjee earned his B.S. in Civil Engineering from Jadavpur University (India) and his Ph.D. in Environmental Science from Duke University, along with a graduate certificate in Nonlinear and Complex Systems Science. His primary expertise lies in turbulent fluid mechanics, with a focus on atmospheric boundary layers and environmental flows, ecosystem-atmosphere interactions, wildfire behavior, and natural hazards. He is the recipient of the 2022 NSF CAREER Award, the 2024 American Meteorological Society Outstanding Early Career Award from the Committee on Boundary Layers and Turbulence, a 2024 visiting fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Surrey, UK, and the 2025 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Global Environmental Change Early Career Award. He currently serves as an Editor of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (Elsevier), and an Editorial board member of Scientific Reports (Nature) and ARC Geophysical Research. He serves on the Science Advisory Panel of the Fire and Forest Resilience Task Force for the State of California and is Vice-President of the ICCLAS Coupled Land-Atmosphere Systems Commission under the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS). He is currently serving on a National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Consensus study expert committee on Wildland Fires and was also selected to participate in the NAE Frontiers of Engineering Symposium in 2026.