Phone: (206) 769-6808
Email: rgwozdz @ u.washington.edu 

  M.S., Environmental Science
  Western Washington University
  Bellingham, WA (2006)

  B.S., Biology
  Western Washington University
  Bellingham, WA (2003)

Curriculum Vitae (Microsoft Word document)

1. Spatial variation in forest fuel moisture: comparisons of scale, and climatic variation.
    
   Estimates of forest fuel moisture are provided at coarse scale and consider only generally meteorological conditions (air temperature, humidity, day length). At fine scales, air temperature and humidity are likely to vary widely due to elevation, aspect, terrain, shading, and forest canopy cover. I am using a fine scale hydrology model to decompose coarse scale meteorology over the topographically complex eastern Washington Cascade Mountains to a grain of 90 meters. The National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) will be used to model fuel moisture indices at 90 meters and a 3 hourly time step. Comparisons to coarse spatial and temporal models will be made . I will also explore the sensitivity of any patterns in spatial variation to changes in climate.
    
2. Probabilistic simulation of fire spread: coupling a percolation model with spatially / temporally explicit weather, fuel, and topographic data.
    
   Physically based, deterministic models of fire spread (e.g., FARSITE) are difficult to implement over the long time periods and large spatial extents required to examine fire regime change. Some researchers have attempted to address this problem by building simplified "percolation" models, where fire is passed across cells of a gridded landscape. These models however are often decoupled from synoptic weather events and instead depend on the general climatic conditions in a given year. Thus, it may be difficult to simulate realistic fire sizes and shapes as these are determined by both fuel moistures and wind conditions. I will incorporate a grid-based, 3 hourly weather stream into a percolation based model of fire spread and attempt to simulate recent fire events in the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest.