David Melecio-Vazquez

Dr. David Melecio-Vazquez


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

4Years (2023-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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31 May 2023 in Fire
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
DMDavid Melecio-Vazquez
David Melecio-Vazquez
CLChris Lautenberger
Chris Lautenberger
HHHo Hsieh
Ho Hsieh
MAMichael Amodeo
Michael Amodeo
Jeremy PorterJeremy Porter
Jeremy Porter
Edward Joseph KearnsEdward Joseph Kearns
Edward Joseph Kearns
Accurate representation of fire emissions and smoke transport is crucial for current and future wildfire-smoke projections. We present a flexible modeling framework for emissions sourced from the First Street Foundation Wildfire Model (FSF-WFM) to provide a national map for near-surface smoke conditions exceeding the threshold for unhealthy concentrations of particulate matter at or less than 2.5 µm, or PM2.5. Smoke yield from simulated fires is converted to emissions transported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s HYSPLIT model. We present a strategy for sampling from a simulation of ~65 million individual fires, to depict the occurrence of “unhealthy smoke days” defined as 24-h average PM2.5 concentration greater than 35.4 µg/m3 from HYSPLIT. The comparison with historical smoke simulations finds reasonable agreement using only a small subset of simulated fires. The total amount of PM2.5 mass-released threshold of 1015 µg was found to be effective for simulating the occurrence of unhealthy days without significant computational burden.