Co-lead, Extreme Weather & Wildfire Team (Historical Extreme Weather Analysis)

Senior Research Scientist, University of San Francisco; Project Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Janice is the Co-lead of the Extreme Weather & Wildfire Team. Her responsibilities include using instrumentation and data sources to identify critical variables and scenarios as they relate to electricity assets; analyzing historical fire events to identify danger spots; and further analyzing these danger spots with a fine-scale, targeted approach to quantify wind underestimates in forecast and mesonet data. She is collecting historical data on all large fire events and major fire events, identifying critical scenarios, and refining the analysis with a targeted approach to identify flow regimes and sets of conditions that drive major fire events. Janice has 25 years of experience studying wildland fire dynamics and phenomena using coupled weather–fire computer simulation models and ground-based and airborne infrared imagery of wildland fire dynamics. Her experience includes numerical modeling of airflow, precipitation, and turbulence over complex terrain and weather forecasting systems. She has developed two coupled weather–fire models—CAWFE and the WRF-Fire module in WRF—and used them with satellite active fire detection data to investigate major wildfire events and forecast fire growth. She holds a doctorate in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago.