I'm currently a NOAA Climate and Global Change (C&GC) postdoctoral fellow working with Prof. James Randerson in the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. My current research focuses on mapping the satellite-derived progression of wildfires in the western United States, investigating the climate and active fire suppression controls on fire spread, and quantifying related air quality and public health impacts. Broadly, I use a combination of remote sensing, GIS, statistics/machine learning, and atmospheric modeling to understand modern human-fire relationships, the role of fire in the Earth system, and the impacts of extreme events on planetary health. I love data visualization with geospatial data, such as with Google Earth Engine Apps, and wrangling code to explore all kinds of data from satellites, aircraft, ground monitors, models, and surveys/reports. During my Ph.D. in the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard University, my research focused on 1) investigating trends in the timing and magnitude of crop residue burning in northwestern India, as well as the drivers and air quality consequences of these shifts; 2) quantifying smoke exposure and public health impacts associated with fire emissions in Indonesia; and 3) assessing satellite-derived fire-related smoke in North America. In the past, I worked at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on a variety of topics from physical oceanography to paleoceanography to organic biogeochemistry. In my spare time, I enjoy poetry, photography, TV/movie/game soundtracks, basketball, board games, and crime dramas/docuseries.
Conferences/Events
American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2023
December 11-15, 2023 at Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA
This year, I co-convened the session B31L Prescribed Fires and Land Management in North America (Posters). I presented a poster on "Active Fire Line as a Key Control on Hourly Fire Growth for Predictive Modeling" on Wednesday morning, December 13 (abstract).
"Measuring Wildfire-Fuel Treatment Outcomes at Large Scales” Workshop
December 4, 2023 at Hyatt Regency Hotel, Monterey, CA
I presented a coding and online app demo on GOES-based wildfire tracking in Google Earth Engine at the "Measuring Wildfire-Fuel Treatment Outcomes at Large Scales” workshop during the 10th Annual International Fire Ecology and Management Congress (info).
EPA Model Applications Weekly Meeting
November 15, 2023
I presented a talk on NOAA's Hazard Mapping System (HMS) smoke product and its biases and uncertainties compared to ground-based observations and model estimates of smoke at the EPA Model Applications Weekly Meeting.
Papers/Writing
Systematically tracking the hourly progression of large wildfires using GOES satellite observations
March 15, 2024
Our paper is published in Earth System Science Data (main + SI)! The GOFER product associated with our paper is available on Zenodo and can be visualized on Earth Engine Apps.
Improved estimates of smoke exposure during Australia fire seasons: Importance of quantifying plume injection heights
March 7, 2024
Xu Feng's paper is published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (main + SI)!
Google Earth Engine Book
October 6, 2023
The open-access book, "Cloud-Based Remote Sensing with Google Earth Engine" is now published by Springer and available here! Morgan Crowley and I contributed a chapter on "Active Fire Monitoring" (Chapter 46). We did a video walkthrough of our chapter on October 23 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Please visit the book's website for more info.