Cliff Mass is a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. His research focuses on numerical weather modeling and prediction, the role of topography in the evolution of weather systems, regional climate modeling, and the weather of the Pacific Northwest.

Cliff joins us a Wire Insider to discuss what a environmental “resilience bill” could look like in Washington State.

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We need more information. So the legislature and the state should support climate research more than they’re doing right now. Then the other thing I’m interested in is the wildfire problem, I’ve done a lot of research on that and we need to deal with the forests – we need to thin them, we need to pull stuff out and we need to bring fire back. That’s another major issue that the legislature should be working on. 

If I was suggesting a bill I would have a resilience bill for Washington State. That would include thinning the forests aggressively, bringing back fire. That would also include more reservoir storage so we have plenty of water in the future as our snowpack decreases. It would include getting people away from rivers that tend to flood more and getting them away from slopes that are failing because of heavy rains. So, I would work on the resilience issue. Then there are the other environmental issues: from plastics to puget sound that I think needs more attention.

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