Group News

Activities and events of MESAS research group members

AGU session to explore drivers of fire

July 11, 2017 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group News

I’m excited to be hosting an American Geophysical Union (AGU) session in December 2017 and excited about only having to fly to New Orleans instead of San Francisco. This is the first time in many many years that AGU has not been in San Fran. My session co-conveners are Sam Rabin (Germany), Fang Li (Beijing), and Guido van der Werf (Netherlands). Alex Schaefer (my PhD student) will certainly be out there, and I hope our session hosts a diverse set of oral and poster presentations that allow us all to collectively explore the many different scales of how to study fire patterns on our planet, and what it all means in the context of the on-going human-driven climate change. The session viewer link for AGU is at https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm17/preliminaryview.cgi/Session26024 and here are the details:

Session Title: Quantifying drivers of global and regional fire patterns using data and models

Session ID#: 26024

Session Description: Fire is a critical component of Earth system dynamics and the carbon cycle. However, since climate and human driving factors vary considerably over time and space, capturing observed patterns using simulations remains a major challenge. These challenges also result in important uncertainties in predicting future fire activity, understanding past fire activity, and quantifying the role of fire in the Earth system. Paleorecords offer a diverse source of global/regional fire data on decadal to millennial timescales. The present day has extensive satellite records and increasingly detailed observations. Fire model are informed by present day records, but offer a way to test fundamental hypotheses well beyond the present. This session seeks presentations that aim to quantify the role of humans and climate in driving patterns of fire at multiple spatiotemporal scales. The goal of our session is to foster interdisciplinary discussions of how data can inform models, and models can inform data.

Primary Convener: Brian Indrek Magi, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, United States
Conveners: Sam S Rabin, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany, Fang Li, Inst. of Atmospheric Physics, Beijing, China and Guido van der Werf, Organization Not Listed, Washington, DC, United States

Cross-Listed: A – Atmospheric Sciences, GC – Global Environmental Change, NH – Natural Hazards

Index Terms: 0414 Biogeochemical cycles, processes, and modeling [BIOGEOSCIENCES], 0434 Data sets [BIOGEOSCIENCES], 0466 Modeling [BIOGEOSCIENCES], 1630 Impacts of global change [GLOBAL CHANGE]

Fires in California during Summer 2017

Tags: AGUclimate-fire interactionsfirehuman-fire interactionspyrogeography

Pyrogeography at the AAG Conference

April 17, 2015 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group NewsResearch News

Another major conference is on the horizon – the Association of American Geographers (AAG) meeting which is in Chicago this year. Check #AAG15. Conferences are absolutely critical for multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary research, and I think for just about all research. Science, like many (most?) other professional enterprises, requires discussion. My first AAG was last year in Tampa, and that was a great experience. The atmosphere at the Tampa conference was informal, yet had the intensity associated with presenting a range of results from preliminary to pretty polished to peer-reviewed and published results. I also liked the thematic message from AAG 2014: Research about climate change past, present, and future will benefit from geographical thinking.

Annual firecounts from the NASA MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite. Nearly 2 million fires happen every year!

Annual firecounts from the NASA MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite. Nearly 2 million fires happen every year!

Geographical thinking, to me, implies a consideration of human-environmental interactions across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Atmospheric sciences, which is my “home” discipline, tends to focus on atmospheric interactions across time and space scales. Fire research has to consider human-climate-fire interactions, and while I tend toward the climate-fire side since it’s closer to my home discipline, I keep hoping to see some new patterns that capture some regularity in human behavior in the world of large-scale global fire activity. Fire is important in understanding past and future carbon cycle dynamics, but also seems to be symbolic of the human impact on our planet. Are humans driving fire? Are they agents that change fire regimes and then in turn respond to the changing regime? Or is climate exerting a longer time scale control on fire activity that is above and beyond human control? Many interesting questions emerge from questions about fire drivers at seemingly every spatiotemporal scale, and throughout disciplines that could be aligned with geography.

AAG 2015 will include a full day talks about fire on our planet, or pyrogeography. I think pyrogeography is a great term that encapsulates my research. So Earth Day 2015 for me will be at the AAG Pyrogeography Session. I worked with several different types of researchers studying pyrogeography to bring data, modeling, and cultural expertise together for what is now 25 talks on Wednesday April 22. 8am to 7pm.

Pyrogeography Sessions at AAG
8:00 AM – 9:40 AM 2101 Pyrogeography I: Fire Histories 1
10:00 AM – 11:40 AM 2201 Pyrogeography II: Fire Histories 2
11:40 AM – 1:20 PM Lunch
1:20 PM – 3:00 PM 2401 Pyrogeography III: Fire Drivers
3:20 PM – 5:00 PM 2501 Pyrogeography IV: Fire Case Studies
5:20 PM – 7:00 PM 2601 Pyrogeography V: West African Fires

My talk will focus on how global fire modeling – a framework to simulate the biogeophysical processes driving fire activity – contributes to the discussion, and how it can advance the discussion so that we can better test hypotheses about human-climate-fire interactions. I’ve been closely reviewing some recent (peer-reviewed, published) work by scientists working on fire modeling to prepare for my talk. One of my current favorite visualizations of how human activities introduce big challenges in fire modeling is from a paper by Pfeiffer, Spessa, and Kaplan that shows that the biggest discrepancies between complex fire modeling and satellite data (like above) are in parts of the world most impacted by humans.

Lighter colors indicate that regions with larger discrepancies from observations are in areas impacted most by humans. Are humans agents in fire patterns? Are they responsive?

Lighter colors indicate that regions with larger discrepancies from observations are in areas impacted most by humans.

My colleague, Sam Rabin, will present work we’ve been finalizing over the last 3 months to better understand how satellite data can be used to unpack fire signals into component parts such as cropland and pasture fires. Our research has a lot of interesting implications about how widespread/important pasture fires might be. Not coincidentally, pasture and cropland maps like the one below from our 2012 paper, show that human impact and cultivated land are similar. There is 148 million square kilometers of land on Earth, 100 million square kilometers is vegetated, and 50 million square kilometers is cultivated! HALF of all arable land is cultivated! By inference, we need to know more about pasture and cropland fire practices.
Distribution of agriculture, cropland, and pasture. Half of all arable land is currently cultivated.

Distribution of agriculture, cropland, and pasture.

Tags: AAGclimate-fire interactionsfireglobal environmental changehuman-fire interactionsinterdisciplinary researchpyrogeography

Attending AMS 2015 in Phoenix

December 31, 2014 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group NewsResearch News

MESAS students Warren Pettee and Thomas Winesett and I will be attending AMS 2015 (#AMS2015), along with many others from UNC Charlotte. I heard the count was about 8 undergraduate students from the Meteorology Program. Professor Casey Davenport and I will be the faculty representation at AMS – she and I make up 50% of our Meteorology faculty! Dr Davenport and I are also going to be a the AMS Career Fair with a big green UNC Charlotte table. We’ll be talking to anyone interested in learning more about the graduate and undergraduate programs in Atmospheric Sciences, Geology, Earth Sciences, and Geography at UNC Charlotte. Should be fun! Especially if we put out Andes mints.

For presentations, check my publications page for PDFs of the posters, but here is the summary with some images.

Thomas is presenting his poster twice, once at the AMS 14th Student Conference, and once at the AMS 7th Conference on the Meteorological Applications of Lightning Data (MALD) on Monday.

Thomas's AMS 2015 poster

Thomas’s AMS 2015 poster (co-authors are myself and Dr Dan Cecil, NASA MSFC)

Warren is presenting research about his version of WRF and how it performs for the February 2014 Snow Event in Charlotte at the Student Conference.

Warren's AMS 2015 poster (co-authors are myself and Professor Matt Eastin)

Warren’s AMS 2015 poster (co-authors are myself and Professor Matt Eastin)

I am presenting my paper, recently accepted for publication in JTECH, at the 20th Conference on Satellite Meteorology and Oceanography on Monday.

My AMS 2015 poster for the 20th SatMet conference. Based on a paper that will be published at JTECH

My AMS 2015 poster for the 20th SatMet conference. Based on a paper that will be published at JTECH

Tags: AMSGESlightningresearchstudent researchundergraduate research

Funded graduate research assistant for fire modeling project

November 07, 2014 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group NewsResearch News

This is an advertisement I am circulating around to listserves and colleagues to recruit a graduate student (Masters or PhD) into my recently-funded NSF research project. The grant title is “Collaborative Research: Testing Hypotheses About Fire Using Data Syntheses and Fire Modeling” and I am working with researchers at Yale University (Dr Jenn Marlon) and University of Oregon (Dr Bart Bartein) to better understand questions related to the intersection of global fire modeling and paleofire data. The NSF public project summary is here. The recruiting ad is below. Please consider applying! Email if you have questions, or I’d be happy to meet with you at SEDAAG (Athens, GA), AMS (Phoenix, AZ), or AAG (Chicago, IL). Thanks!

Dr. Brian Magi is seeking a graduate student to join the Multidisciplinary Earth System and Atmospheric Sciences (MESAS) research group in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (mesas.uncc.edu). The student will develop research within the context of an NSF funded project focused on studying how global fire modeling can use past and present data to investigate the interactions between fire, climate, and land-use change over a range of time scales. Students will join a multi-institution research team and will engage with an international effort to improve our ability to understand and model fire in the Earth system.

Applicants may apply as a Masters student, or, if they hold an MS degree, as a PhD student. Regardless, applicants should have at least one degree in atmospheric sciences, geography, earth system science, or related field in the physical sciences. The ideal candidate will have a strong quantitative background and computer programming experience, as well as interest in interdisciplinary topics related to climate-human dimensions of global fire activity.

The funded position is available for 2 years, includes tuition, and starts in August 2015. To apply, please email Dr. Brian Magi (brian dot magi at uncc dot edu) a cover letter describing your research interests, goals, and relevant experience, a CV, unofficial college transcripts, GRE scores, and contact information for three references. Questions should be sent to the same email address.

Review of applications will begin immediately and the position will remain open until a suitable candidate is found. After the selection, the successful candidate will apply to be admitted to appropriate UNC Charlotte graduate program; detailed information about the application procedure to the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences is available online (geoearth.uncc.edu).

Tags: firehuman-fire interactionsProspective Studentspyrogeographystudent research

President Obama takes the offensive on climate change

June 25, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group News

Wow. What a speech this afternoon by President Obama on the Georgetown University campus – and a beautiful follow up to his Inaugural Address in January and his State of the Union speech shortly thereafter – noting one satire piece that is worthy of watching. He stepped onto the stage at about 2pm Eastern time and delivered. The backbone was the announcement of the President’s Climate Action Plan (click for PDF). The papers were buzzing – Washington Post for example but there were many many more “responses” to the unveiling of the Climate Action Plan. Twitter was super active from about 2-5 pm Eastern time with #ActOnClimate trending high. I haven’t been around Twitter long enough to see the electricity flowing like this, but watching the speech and the tweets at the same time was pretty inspiring. Entertaining too. Twitter was like a race to see who could point out a quote by @BarackObama the fastest. Obama said a lot of great things, but I like this one.

We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth society

He pointed out that the Clean Air Act only promoted American innovation and did NOT destroy the economy, and noted that the Clean Air Act passed nearly unanimously with only ONE DISSENTING VOTE. Times have changed! He metaphorically referred to the economic potential of moving to clean energy as the building of a new engine, referring (I presume) to the innovation of the automobile industry in America throughout the 20th century. Clean energy is here in this country now. He said that 75% of wind energy is in Republican districts (!). The community organizer in our President emerged as he gave credit to past Republican efforts to help our environment – the EPA was created under the Nixon administration, for example.

I haven’t found the transcript or the high quality video yet, but June 25, 2013 was a very memorable moment for the USA. I hope it marks the turning point and that the USA leads – like it should, says this US Citizen – the development of a global community around the issue of global warming. I’ll leave you with an amazingly long graphic from the White House page.climate_change_report_62513_final_0

Tags: climateglobal environmental changeglobal warmingimpactsUSA

Coffee is the greatest and healthiest drink on the planet

June 16, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group News

Agent Dale Cooper from the Twin Peaks TV series. He relished his cup of coffee.

Agent Dale Cooper from the Twin Peaks TV series. He relished his cup of coffee.

Ok, maybe this article/post doesn’t exactly say what I chose to title this. But I like coffee, so all my scientific training goes out the window and I just nod at every self-reinforcing statement in that article. I’ll admit that I won’t even bother to do any level of fact-checking on this. It just has to be true!

I evolved about 6-7 years ago and drink black coffee about 95% of the time. I think I switched from milk-coffee to black because I spent my free birthday starbucks coffee on a pumpkin spice latte. Gross. I’ll still get a (non pumpkin spice) latte every now and then, but a good cup of espresso or black at the right temperature… wow. Grab a cup, and watch a wordsmith talk about how little we should care about the facts (in this case). Long live coffee! Long live Agent Cooper! And, heck, long live chocolate too! It’s good for you – prove me wrong.

Tags: coffee

UNC Charlotte undergraduate research

April 24, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group News

The Meteorology Program here at UNC Charlotte is embedded in the Geography and Earth Sciences Department. We have solid core of undergraduate Meteorology BSc majors and coursework in the major is mostly supported by 4 faculty – Dr Adams, Dr Eastin, Mr Shirley, and myself. What has impressed me since I joined the faculty has been how often undergraduates are involved in research and independent study as they prepare for life after college.

I’ve been working with an undergraduate Meteorology major named Daniel Cunningham since July 2012 on a project about global lightning distributions – which is related to my fire research. Daniel has been working hard to keep up with coursework and the research project all year, and his efforts culminated in a nice finish in his senior year. He won 1st place for departmental research projects at the UNC Charlotte Undergraduate Research Conference! Here’s the department announcement. Daniel presented a poster called “Extending the Time Series of Satellite-Based Lightning Observations” – here’s a key figure he made with Panoply explaining what he did.

Global lightning map before D. Cunningham's research (top) and after (bottom). Northern latitudes were completely missing before his project started. Evaluation of the results are the next step.

Global lightning map before D. Cunningham’s research (top) and after (bottom). Northern latitudes were completely missing before his project started. Evaluation of the results are the next step.

This research has helped in many ways. Daniel was accepted into the University of Alabama Huntsville Atmospheric Sciences graduate program starting Fall 2013, he has picked up programming skills (Matlab), learned about statistical models of physical phenomena, learned how to mathematically explore large data set, how to make figures, and finally how to put together a prize-winning poster. Here is the UNC Charlotte announcement. Undergraduate research is how I got started on my long path to the faculty position here at UNC Charlotte. Perhaps not coincidentally, that undergraduate research was about lightning – I’ve returned to my roots.

Congratulations to Daniel. Also, on the theme of undergraduate research, three of our meteorology majors in total walked away with top awards. Brandy Stimac works with Dr Adams and Dr Eastin. Ricky Huff works with Dr Adams. Undergraduate research is strong in the Meteorology program! I’m looking forward to seeing graduation this year. I think the class size is about 10 students, and about 5 will go to graduate school, and 1 will be working to be a K-12 science teacher. Again, good numbers to see!

Tags: firegraduate schoollightningundergraduate research

Charlotte Research Scholars 2013

February 13, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group NewsResearch News

Cross-posted from a campus-wide announcement. I participated as a CRS mentor in Summer 2012 and have volunteered to participate again this summer. Please let me know if you’re interested in working on a project – this is a great chance to get paid to do research and learn valuable skills. Apply now – it’s not a committment and it’s certainly NOT a guarantee that you’ll even get the funding. 60 applicants will be selected from a pool that I would guess would be about 200 students. Maybe more. Application is here and is due by 5:00 pm on Feb 25.

……………….START ANNOUNCEMENT……………………….

Attention rising seniors, you can now apply for the 2013 Charlotte Research Scholars summer program.

The Charlotte Research Scholars (CRS) program is sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs, Graduate School, and Charlotte Research Institute. It will provide 60 UNC Charlotte undergraduate students funding to participate in a 10-week research program. Scholars receive one-on-one, faculty-guided research training, and participate in weekly professional development sessions to better prepare them for graduate school and a future research career. The program culminates in the Summer Research Symposium, held on August 1st in the Student Union. Additional details are below.

Application deadline: 5:00 pm on February 25, 2013
Program length: May 28 to August 3 (10 weeks)
Eligibility: Undergraduates with a minimum GPA of 2.8 and between 50 and 110 credit hours by spring 2013
Compensation: Scholars will receive a $4,000 fellowship
Application: Apply here

Frequently Asked Questions:
How much time are scholars expected to commit to their research project?
Scholars are expected to work full-time for the entire 10-weeks. They will spend approximately 3-4 hrs/week away from the project in order to participate in professional development activities.
How will the scholars be selected?
The CRS steering committee will attempt to match the most qualified students with research projects that are of interest to them. To facilitate this matching, students will include a ranking of their preferred project choices in their application. If a match is identified, the faculty member will be contacted to see if there is interest in the applicant. In addition, feel free to indicate any preferences for particular students that you might have in the text of your email (not the submission form).
Whom do I contact if I have additional questions?
Dennis Livesay, Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics (drlivesa@uncc.edu).

Tags: CRSundergraduate research

News for prospective students in Fall 2013

January 12, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group News

I will have money to support a Masters degree student as a Teaching Assistant in Fall 2013 – full application (with letters of rec) is due 1 February 2013. Please read through the materials on my research page, starting with my page for Prospective Students. Feel free to email me of course (email listed in right side bar), but everything begins with the application to the graduate school.

Tags: MastersProspective StudentsTA

Science meeting in Austin Texas

December 18, 2012 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group NewsResearch News

If you’re an undergraduate in physics, math, or a related field, and thinking about graduate school options, my colleague Professor Manda Adams and I will be in Austin, Texas from January 5-11 2013 for the American Meteorological Society Student Conference and for the full professional conference. Send me an email if you want to meet up and talk about grad school at UNC Charlotte! Also, I will be presenting some of my research in global fire modeling on Thursday from 9:30-9:45am in this session. My presentation will be about the role that satellite-based lightning data plays in global fire modeling.

Tags: AMSinterdisciplinary researchstudent research