Both Daniel and I will be travelling to Austin Texas for the 2013 American Meteorological Society meeting. Thousands of students and scientists attend this meeting to discuss topics ranging from weather forecasting to climate modeling to air quality. My research on fire-climate interactions may not seem to fit at first, but one of the key inputs to my fire model is lightning and it turns out there is a very large number of presentations by experts in all aspects of lightning. That’s the group of scientists I’ll be presenting to in a talk called “The Role of Lightning in Simulations of the Spatiotemporal Distribution of Global Fire“. I’m looking forward to getting feedback from the people who study lightning more rigorously than I do. Daniel will present “Extending the Time Series of Satellite-Based Lightning Observations” as a poster at the AMS student conference. This is the research he is doing for his Honors thesis.