The Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is seeking one Wildland Fire Analyst Intern to work directly with our wildfire planning analysts and scientists on various projects related to fire suppression, fire danger, smoke management, and fire weather. The DNR Wildfire Program is the state's largest on-call fire department with over 1,500 permanent and seasonal employees engaged in fire suppression across 13 million acres of private and state forest lands annually. Within the Wildfire Program, planning section staff provide scientific consultation, analysis, monitoring, and predictive capabilities to support the agency's fire operations mission.
This unique internship will offer the selected candidate valuable, direct experience and the opportunity to work on current and planned projects or choose their own projects within the planning section's program areas:
- [Fire Meteorology/Climate] Synthesize climate change impacts to agency fire suppression capabilities, investigate meteorological conditions leading to public smoke complaints or smoke intrusions
- [Fire Danger] Analyze fire occurrence trends across state lands, determine appropriate fire danger indices for Industrial Fire Precaution Level zones
- [Science/Tech Transfer] Conduct literature syntheses of wildland fire science and technology subjects and prepare non-technical reports for state fire leadership, develop a training program/material for implementing mobile data collection efforts for initial attack firefighting
- [GIS] Aggregate and analyze state and federal fire geospatial data for integration into corporate data systems, perform ad-hoc analysis for fire management, use scripting tools to automate data delivery and map production, enhance existing web GIS viewers and create meaningful data dashboards
- [Fire Environment Monitoring] Determine candidate sites for future fire detection camera installations, evaluate effectiveness of current fire weather station locations for fire danger applications
This intern will visit, under staff supervision, active wildfire incidents (fireline, incident bases, helibases) to learn more about fire operations and may also participate in daily statewide fire operations calls. At the end of the internship period, the successful candidate is expected to present a presentation to division staff on their experience as well as a report on their project.