The many facets of meteorology and paths to arrive at UAF TRICIA: My name is Tricia Hutton. I am 25 years old. I’m currently living here in Fairbanks, Alaska, but I was born and raised in Rochester, New York. Today I am here with my friend and fellow graduate student, Jacob. JACOB: Hello, my name is Jacob Coffey. I am 24. I currently live in Fairbanks and am from Patchogue, New York, and I am here with my fellow graduate student and friend, Tricia. TRICIA: So I’m a background in meteorology and atmospheric science, also earth sciences. I’m continuing my master’s degree right now in earth systems science with a focus in atmospheric and climate sciences, where my background is mostly, was in meteorology but I’m now much more of the modeling focus. JACOB: My undergraduate was a mix of meteorology and climatology for my classes, and I graduated with a bachelor’s in meteorology. Then coming here I’m using the meteorological knowledge and adapting it to a more broad view of it, to where I use some modeling data, butdon’t do direct modeling like you do. TRICIA: Yeah, so we have two unique perspectives where you are right now doing your research for your master’s with the model data, and my research currently is almost producing a model. JACOB: How do you feel about being in Alaska doing research? TRICIA: Oh my gosh, it was a dream to come here, this was my dream school, this was my dream education. The research we do is incredible, it’s so necessary with us already experiencing changes in the climate, and the different variability we experience. We also have our undergraduate program starting here. I’m excited to have undergrads with us, and my undergrad didn’t have graduate students at the same school. But what about you? You’re almost, you’re wrapping up your master’s. JACOB: I feel incredibly lucky to have been given this opportunity from both my advisors and to gather all of the knowledge I can from the people here. I think it’s been a great experience. The Alaska winters are a little rough. TRICIA: No, it’s amazing! JACOB: But outside of that, it’s been beautiful here. The growing season is definitely my favorite, though. TRICIA: Unless you live here, I feel like people forget that we even could have fire seasons. I thought okay, fire weather, I didn’t really think that it was such a big atmospheric science or meteorology topic. JACOB: I was surprised how much went into it, because coming from New York, we didn’t talk about fire. Fire wasn’t a thing. We had thunderstorms, we had nor’easters that would track through and then occasionally lake effects, when I went to college. Come here and find out that million-acre years are pretty common and they’re dealt as extreme years, but in more recent years, you wind up seeing more and more million acres burned. And I think 2004 was the most, and it was a couple million acres. TRICIA: Just a couple million. JACOB: It was more than three. TRICIA: The news highlights the Canadian fires. JACOB: They don’t highlight Alaska. TRICIA: They don’t. And we have the same tundra and we have similar vegetation but I feel like people don’t know about it. JACOB: Yeah, until it impacts a populated area it doesn’t get a lot of coverage. Even the Canadian fires got coverage for a day or two, but [snaps] three days later, it was like nothing happened. My work has been on the top level of fuel because we’ve been seeing more fires out of the boreal forest and you wind up having these fast, widespread fires. So I’ve been looking at the index that determines the spreadability, called the Initial Spread Index, which takes a lot of different observational values, so your precipitation, your humidity, your temperature, your wind. It’s broken up into four subseasons based off the main driver, that being wind-driven fires, the duff-driven fires, the drought season to where we just don’t get our long-term rain because convective rain like thunderstorms will cause more fires. TRICIA: Did you ever think you’d do fire research? JACOB: No, funny enough, I initiallyhad thought I’d go out of college right into work. I thought I’d do a lot of watches and warnings calculations. TRICIA: I know a lot of people in our field are like, “I knew I wanted to be a meteorologist since I was a little kid.” Were you one of those? No. JACOB: No, no. So I initially wanted to make video games and then I was terrible at coding. TRICIA: But you still have to code all the time here. JACOB: Correct, but it’s not to the extent that I have to for video games. When I was in early high school, I realized I didn’t want to do video games anymore and I didn’t want to, I didn’t know what to do. I had an earth science teacher who kind of made me gravitate toward a love of science. When you go into meteorology, you find people who are either just there for the credits or they tap out when they find calculus. TRICIA: Mm-hmm. And all the physics. It’s a heavy degree. JACOB: But I grew up in Florida, and we had gotten our fair share of hurricanes for the seven years I lived there. TRICIA: I think personal impact, a lot of people have stories of, when we experienced this tornado or flooding or something like that, that it’s a very heartfelt and impactful scenario that then we want to further understand or better our community with it. JACOB: What about you? What drove you to the field? Were you always just looking at the clouds? TRICIA: [laughs] I was always looking at the clouds but I never connected the love for meteorology or the idea to study it until much later. I had no idea what I wanted other than the fact that I wanted to help people. I thought maybe nursing, teaching, social work, physical therapy. I literally switched my major so many times because I was so indecisive. I took a random geography class to learn where different countries are that I would want to go travel to one day. It’s so embarrassing. And after taking this class, we learned about large-scale atmospheric circulations like the Hadley cells and things like that, and I fell in love with it. It was at a community college back in New York and I was just like, “Woah, whatever this is, how can I make this my life?” JACOB: After this is all said and done, what do you want to explore in Alaska? TRICIA: I want to look at rain-on-snow events across Alaska, which is becoming more frequent when we already have some cool temperatures and snow is on the ground, and then we have a warming period, and then we have rain falling. We had what, icemageddon, before I moved here? JACOB: Before I moved here, we had icemageddon TRICIA: Yeah, before I moved here. And a lot of moose died from it, so there’s a lot of different impacts on it. JACOB: I didn’t know that there was wildlife deaths that were recorded for that, that’s interesting. TRICIA: Yeah, so there’s transportation impacts, there’s plane and cargo impacts but also if we get enough rain that freezes, that can also hurt the plants that the animals are trying to eat if it’s covered in all this ice. Our field is so interdisciplinary. You can’t study fire weather without knowing the buildup and the vegetation. And you can’t do rain on snow events without knowing all the other aspects of the hydrology and other impacts of it. JACOB: And the weirdest bit is permafrost. TRICIA: I was going to say something about permafrost up here. JACOB: Permafrost currently, if you’re in a continuous area, you don’t have interaction with the soil and the water. So it just pools at the top and doesn’t interact with the deeper layers. TRICIA: There’s just so much, it’s such a complex system that you just always need to- JACOB: You can never get it all. Especially when you’re doing future modeling, you can’t predict every variable and how it’s going to change. That’s the really difficult aspect. TRICIA: Especially up here, when it’s so niche. And such remote places have different hazards and impacts that you just cannot cover everything. JACOB: I think coming here and doing fire weather, doing a conference or two or through talking to people, there’s a lot of connection to fire or just to weather. And that’s the one thing that surprised me is just how much of a connection people can tie to experiences with weather or just weather as a whole. I did realize very early on when I was finding out what you can do with this was my end goal was to help people, which is why I didn’t immediately gravitate toward graduate work at first. And now doing graduate work, it’s been helpful to see that goal. TRICIA: Because it builds you up more to then go out into the field and help people in the future.