Warren Heilman is riveted by numbers, especially those that tell the story of how weather affects wildfires.
Heilman is a U.S. Forest Service meteorologist who conducts studies at the Northern Research Stations’ East Lansing, Mich. office. His work on how weather impacts fire behavior helps firefighters and fire managers better understand how fires spread across the landscape.
His research leads him down seemingly endless lists of questions for which answers are sometimes elusive.
“There are always new questions one can raise, and it’s a complicated arena of science that you just have to continue pursuing,” he said. “You can’t be discouraged by hurdles being thrown in your face. . . There are a lot of things I don’t know and haven’t figured out, but I’m pretty persistent in looking for scientific explanations of why wildland fires behave the way they do.”
See what else Heilman has to say in the Forest Service special feature Faces of the Forest, a bi-weekly feature by the Office of Communication to showcase the people, places and professions within the agency.
Heilman is just one of the more than 35,000 employees whose work ensures the health of the nation’s 193 million acres of forests and grasslands. The series will introduce you to a variety of people and jobs, like the person who studies weather to help shape wildfire fighting techniques and the person who is helping to save a rare bird species in the Forest Service’s only rain forest.