Daniel Obrist

Chasing Fires

For scientist Daniel Obrist, chasing fires is just part of the job. Obrist, an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), followed controlled burns for two years to identify airborne particles in smoke that result from different types of fires. He hopes to create a database of fire emissions to help Lake Tahoe environmental agencies identify different types of prescribed fire and emissions associated with them.

“I think an important part of regulatory issues is to understand air quality concerns in regards to prescribed burns,” he said. “Do different types of fires lead to different chemical emissions? Is there an easy way to measure them?”

Management agencies at Lake Tahoe allow a number of controlled fires each summer to decrease naturally occurring forest fuel that could lead to larger, more destructive wildfires. Obrist coordinated with the United States Forest Service and the Incline Fire Department to collect data at various sites of fires. With the data collection complete, Obrist and his team are now analyzing the data and writing the reports.

“I said ‘give us a call when you burn,” Obrist said. “We hunted down the smoke at a relatively close proximity, making sure we were downwind where the fires occurred.”

From the emissions measurements, Obrist and his colleagues are now creating a database of fire emissions and particulates to better quantify how managed fires affect air quality in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Ultimately the database could lead to observation stations to identify what types of fires have burned in the Lake Tahoe Basin and where they occurred.

“We’re concerned with fires that occur in the Tahoe Basin,” he said. “When you live in the area you get impacted by the emissions of those prescribed fires.”

Obrist started at DRI while a graduate student in 1999. For several years he researched how mercury is processed in the ecosystem. As a scientist working on how pollutants are cycled between the land surfaces and the air, Obrist hopes his past two year’s research will shed more light on the impacts of atmospheric pollution to the health of the basin’s land and water ecology.

“This research is not just to look at the atmospheric side but to try to understand to what degree terrestrial areas can have implications on what we find in the atmosphere,” Obrist said.