Weather, Mars, and wildfires ... who knew?

I've always loved weather. I love the kinds of weather than many folks hate. I love wind. I love desert heat. I love snow, falling so hard I can barely see through it. There's something in weather about being connected to this huge cosmos, (temporarily) surrendering comfort to the openness of it. And there's something about its freedom—not my freedom in it, but weather's freedom from me, from us. Its indifference to our wishes, its refusal to yield to our control. It schools us, humbles us. Reminds us of our inevitable limitations. And usually welcomes us, provided we enter on its terms and not our own. I'm reminded of the message on a friend's t-shirt: "Skiing is the ultimate dance, and the mountain always leads." To paraphrase: Weather is the ultimate dance partner, and she chooses the music.

I mention my love for weather as an entree to another topic—actually, two other topics, both weather-related. But lest I lose your interest because you're thinking this is going to be nothing but an overdrawn, totally naive paean to weather, let me qualify my enthusiasm. I also recognize the terrible side of weather's indifference to human wishes and human interventions. And I have to admit that my affection for weather has been challenged in recent years by the stark realities of its extreme versions both locally and worldwide: record drought, record wildfires, record rains, record tornadoes, record flooding, record hurricanes, record typhoons ... the terrible side of weather.

Weather is unquestionably a force in our lives, both marvelous and terrifying. And knowing more about it can only help. Fortunately, balancing my naive affection for strong wind and dessert heat are calm, scientific approaches of folks like the atmospheric scientists at the University of Colorado and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), both located in Boulder, right next door to my weather innocence. Which brings me to my actual topic: My concept of "weather"—the kind I love or curse—is so much narrower than "weather" science tells me it could be. I learned this by happenstance. In the past week, I've read about two scientific undertakings that happily merge my interest in weather with other topics about which I am just about as enthusiastic: space and fires.

First, and most immediate, is today's launch of a new Mars orbiter whose scientific payload is the MAVEN, which stands for "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission" (I know, the acronym is a stretch, but it actually does describe, in an obscure sort of way, what the orbiter will do). I actually just watched the launch live on NASA TV. The timing of the launch was crucial, because Mars isn't sitting still waiting for us to send a spacecraft up to visit. So missing this time window might have sunk the mission. But off it went on an 11-month trip to Mars, where it will put itself in orbit and hang around for a decade or so.

Assuming all goes well en route, MAVEN, whose lead scientist is at CU, will be studying Mars weather (ah, there's the connection!) in an attempt to figure out what happened to the water that clearly used to flow on Mars. Now, this undertaking may seem really remote (well, it is really remote .... but I mean it in a different way here), but this information could tell us a lot about how Mars evolved differently from Earth, losing the atmosphere that retained water and therefore sustained life. This in turn, will tell us something (more) about how planets nurture life—important information as we try to determine whether life exists (has existed, will exist) on other planets. If you've followed at all my interest in cosmology, you can imagine why I find this fascinating, especially with the weather connection, another passion that you now know about. Weather! on Mars! How cool is that?

The other unexpected weather connection I just learned about is a link between weather and fire. Not in the way you might think. This isn't about how fire is affected by weather—factors like aridity, heat, and wind. Instead it's about how fire actually is weather. This time, it was scientists at NCAR (working with others at the University of MD) whose thinking stretched my own. Fire behavior has always been the province of forestry scientists, who have tried to explain (and, ideally, predict) how fires will act based on phenomena related to forests and weather—type and distribution of fuel, terrain, natural barriers, humidity, wind, and so forth. But it seems that when atmospheric scientists brought a new perspective to the question of how wildfires behave, the game changed. It's testimony to the value of interdisciplinary work (and to the problem of academic "silos") that their different "eyes" saw something new. 

It turns out that fire behavior looks a lot like weather, perhaps especially like thunderstorms. As the fire consumes fuel, it produces moisture and heat, which rise—much like heated air in a thunderstorm. This draws in air at the base of the fire (much like thunderstorms do), creating multi-directional winds of the sort that may cause wildfires to "blow up" and that catch firefighters unprepared. The combination of this model of wildfire behavior and improved satellite weather data may change the future of wildfire management. If so, this view of fire as weather may save some lives.

I've always loved weather. It's one reason I love Colorado—the weather here is so varied and so changeable, so wonderful and so humbling. So free, despite our wish to control it. It turns out that the very word "weather" has the same quality. It just keeps morphing, changing. I love that about language. It's so free, despite our wish to control it.