As part of the multidisciplinary National Fire and Fire Surrogate study, we used drift fences with pitfall traps from May to September 2003 and 2004 to determine how three fuel reduction techniques affected shrews in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Grounddwelling macroarthropods also were collected from a subset of pitfall traps to assess relative prey availability among t...

Burn severity has profound impacts on the response of post-fire forest ecosystems to fire events. Numerous previous studies have reported that burn severity is determined by variables such as meteorological conditions, pre-fire forest structure, and fuel characteristics. An underlying assumption of these studies was the constant effects of environmental variables on burn severity over space, an...

Wildfire risk assessment has traditionally been carried out using models based on meteorological parameters measured at spatially sparse weather stations. Remote sensing techniques can offer a cost effective way of esimating the required parameters such as fuel moisture and fuel temperature in near-real time. Moreover remote sensing can provide wide area coverage and thus circumvent errors intr...

This document sets forth procedures for establishing maximum emissions levels for all fossil-fuelbased thermal power plants with a capacity of 50 or more megawatts of electricity (MWe) that use coal, fuel oil, or natural gas.1 Conventional steam-producing thermal power plants generate electricity through a series of energy conversion stages: fuel is burned in boilers to convert water to high-pr...

Original scientific paper Numerical simulations of four combustion processes in a dual-fuel combustor of chemically recuperated gas turbine (CRGT) were carried out in this work. The fuels in the four combustion processes were liquid fuel, liquid fuel + steam, liquid fuel + reformed gas and reformed gas, respectively. The mathematical models adopted for different fuels combustion consist of real...

Fire suppression and changing climate have resulted in increased large wildfire frequency and severity in the western United States, causing carbon cycle impacts. Forest thinning and prescribed burning reduce high-severity fire risk, but require removal of biomass and emissions of carbon from burning. During each fire a fraction of the burning vegetation and soil organic matter is converted int...

Weather affects wildland fires at scales frommultiseasonal precipitation patterns and anomalies, through synoptic and mesoscale weather patterns, to convective scale motions including fire-induced winds. This work analyzed the first day’s growth of the 2012 High Park fire, which occurred in Colorado’s Front Range during widespread drought and an unseasonal June windstorm, assessing to what exte...

Past research on the disproportionality of pollution suggests a small subset of a sector's facilities often produces the lion's share of toxic emissions. Here we extend this idea to the world's electricity sectors by calculating national-level disproportionality Gini coefficients for plant-level carbon emissions in 161 nations based on data from 19,941 fossil-fuel burning power plants. We also ...

Ignitable Liquid Absorbent (ILA), a commercial solid absorbent intended to assist fire scene investigators in sample location and collection, has been field tested in three separate room fires. The ability of the ILA to detect and absorb different amounts of gasoline, odorless paint thinner, and camp fuel on two different substrates after a full-scale burn was assessed against results from an a...

This paper analyzes short-run interfuel substitution between fossil fuels in West European power generation. The problem is studied within a restricted translog cost model, which is estimated by pooling time-series data across eight countries in West Europe. The empirical results indicate that interfuel substitution in existing power plants is substantial, especially that between oil and gas. T...