I will be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at The University of British Columbia in January 2025. Please get in touch if you're interested in working with me at UBC as a graduate student (Masters or PhD)! My lab will investigate air quality, public health, and climate-related issues with a central focus on fires. Please see the lab website or this page for more information.
Tianjia (Tina) Liu is 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. Her 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, Tina uses 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. She loves 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 her Ph.D. in the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard University, Tina's 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 across North America. In her spare time, Tina enjoys poetry, photography, TV/movie/game soundtracks, basketball, board games, and crime dramas/docuseries.
Conferences/Events
NOAA Summer Institute
July 16, 2024 at Steamboat Springs, CO
I presented a talk on "Toward modeling the hourly growth of large wildfires with a suite of meteorological, human, and land-based controls" at the NOAA Summer Institute as part of the NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellowship program.
SIAM Conference for Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE24)
June 11, 2024 at Hilton Hotel, Portland, OR
I presented a talk on "Toward modeling the hourly growth of large wildfires with a suite of meteorological, human, and land-based controls" for the Mini-symposium on
"Advances in the Numerical and Statistical Modeling of Wildland Fires" at the SIAM Conference for Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE24).
Climate and Wildfire Related Air Quality and Public Health Impacts Workshop
May 16-17, 2024 at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
I attended the "Climate and Wildfire Related Air Quality and Public Health Impacts Workshop" as part of the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge at UCLA and served as a panelist for the "Making the Models Work: Leveraging Observational and Modeling Data to Study Public Health Impacts" session. (agenda)
Papers/Writing
Is the smoke aloft? Caveats regarding the use of the Hazard Mapping System (HMS) smoke product as a proxy for surface smoke presence across the United States
October 2, 2024
Our paper is published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire (main + SI)! Check out my HMS Smoke Explorer to visualize the HMS smoke and fire products.
Air pollution and blood pressure: Evidence from Indonesia
July 2, 2024
Jaime Madrigano's paper is published in GeoHealth (main + SI)!
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.