“How is the wind channelized in the gap between two trees? Believe it or not, that actually matters a lot,” says UC Irvine atmospheric scientist [and associate professor of civil & environmental engineering] Tirtha Banerjee, who studies how wind influences wildfire. “That has an impact on how the fire burns.” And once those winds reached the town of Lahaina, they poured between buildings in complicated ways, further confounding predictions for where the fire might spread.” Read More