RESEARCH
Employing my training as a climate scientist, knowledge of aerospace, and my artistic skills, I have led research and outreach projects that deal with predicting hazards and creating sustainable environments for humans and nature. Highlighted below are projects I have led and presented, including my Ph.D. research, past internships, and college projects. You can also read through a list of my publications.
Large increases in forest fire extent in the western United States in recent decades have harmed human health and ecosystems, motivating my recent research. In my Ph.D., I sought to understand the drivers of fire in the western US, the role of climate, and what historical trends tell us about the future.
Pacific Sea-Surface Temperatures Influence Western US Wildfire
A major mode of natural climate variability in the western US comes from the tropical Pacific Ocean, namely the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In this study, we are characterizing the influence of a tropical Pacific sea-surface temperature (SST) trend that resembles ENSO, which may have had a detectable influence on western US hydroclimate and area burned over the last forty years.
Publication
-
Under review
Data
-
Western US MTBS-Interagency (WUMI2) wildfire database (Juang et al., 2022): https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sf7m0cg72
Presentations
-
Juang, C. (2024). Characterizing the climate drivers of burned area in the western US, 1984-present. Invited speaker, NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) Lunch Seminar. New York, NY. 15 May.
-
Juang, C.S., Williams, A.P. (2023). Characterizing Present-Day fire for the Future: Four Decades of Wildfire Activity in Western US Forests Driven by Trends in Warming, Drying, and a La-Niña-like tropical Pacific Ocean state [GC34D-01]. Invited oral presentation at the 2023 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. San Francisco, CA. 11-15 December.
-
Watch my presentation: https://youtu.be/r4OLSmyl1zY
-
Causes of Exponential Annual Area Burned of Western US Forest Fires
Rapid growth of large forest fires drives the exponential response of annual forest-fire area to aridity in the western United States (Geophysical Research Letters, March 2022)
In the western US, forest fire is driven primarily by climate. As the atmosphere becomes more arid, area burned increases exponentially. Although scientists frequently use this fire-aridity relationship to project wildfire responses to climate change, the cause of the exponential relationship had not been robustly investigated. We created and used a database of 18,000 fires to show that the exponential response of annual burned area to fuel dryness is related to how individual wildfires spread. Fire growth is a dispersion phenomenon–similar to how the area of a circle increases exponentially as the radius grows incrementally, wildfires tend to grow at compounding rates; the larger a fire, the more potential it has for rapid growth. As any process occurs that promotes larger fires, such as fuel drying, then the occasional very large fires have much more capacity for growth than the many small fires. Because year-to-year changes in annual burned area are driven largely by the area burned by the occasional very large fires, and because drying trends promote increasingly large leaps in the sizes of large fires, the year-to-year total area burned increases exponentially in response to drying.
Publication in Geophysical Research Letters:
-
Juang, C. S., Williams, A. P., Abatzoglou, J. T., Balch, J. K., Hurteau, M. D., & Moritz, M. A. Rapid Growth of Large Forest Fires Drives the Exponential Response of Annual Forest‐Fire Area to Aridity in the Western United States. Geophysical Research Letters, 49 (5), e2021GL097131. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL097131.
Data
-
Western US MTBS-Interagency (WUMI) wildfire database (Juang et al., 2022): https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sf7m0cg72
My social media explainer (Posted to Twitter): https://carjuang.wixsite.com/portfolio/post/why-forest-fire-area-burned-increases-exponentially-with-aridity-in-the-western-us-twitter
Media coverage
-
BBC Science In Action podcast (March 18, 2022, starts at 24:30): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1l55
-
Ladies of Landsat Manuscript Monday (April 18, 2022): https://twitter.com/LadiesOfLandsat/status/1516057729403605002 (Github repository: https://github.com/ladiesoflandsat/LOLManuscriptMonday)
Presentations
-
Juang, C.S. & Williams, A.P. (2021). Connecting Exponentially-Increasing Burned Area to Fire Spread in Western United States Forests. [U43D-10]. Oral presentation at the 2021 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. New Orleans, LA. 16 December.
-
Watch my presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvkJnFCNvgU.
-
