US Forest Service Research and Development Real-Time High-Resolution Analysis and Forecasting of Fire Weather and Smoke Dispersion in the Western USA - Rocky Mountain Research Station - RMRS - US Forest Service
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Real-Time High-Resolution Analysis and Forecasting of Fire Weather and Smoke Dispersion in the Western USA

The FS Rocky Mountain Center (RMC), a member of FS FCAMMS (http://www.fs.fed.us/fcamms/), provides comprehensive, real-time, high-resolution fire-weather intelligence and smoke forecasts for the Western USA. RMC was established to meet important needs of the fire- and smoke-management community such as the delivery of highly customized value-added weather products, and a quick response to field-users requests for weather intelligence. The RMC Website (http://fireweather.info) offers over 100,000 weather products and tools to assists fire and smoke management. RMC currently supports 4 western Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACCs) with critical weather information, i.e. Rocky Mountain, Southwest, Eastern Great Basin, and Western Great Basin. The project is funded by the National Fire Plan, FS Office of Fire and Aviation Management, FS Rocky Mountain Research Station, and the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP). The National Predictive Services Group provided additional funding to support verification efforts.

RMC conducts a continuous (24/7) technology transfer. New products are put into operational use as soon as they are debugged and tested. The development of new products is prompted by novel research of the RMC staff and user recommendations. In FY 2006, RMC completed the following tasks/products:

  • Improving fire-weather forecast by coupling the MM5 atmospheric model with a state-of-the-art terrestrial biophysical model of ecosystem-atmosphere energy and trace-gas exchange called FORFLUX. This resulted in a new weather model called MFF (see http://fireweather.sc.egov.usda.gov/mm5_forflux.htm) .
  • Comprehensive Web-based system for real-time verification of fire-weather forecasts;
  • Web application to support Go/No-go decisions for prescribed burns called the Weather Planner. It allows for hour-by-hour operational planning of weather sensitive events up to 3 days into the future.
  • Web application for automatic generation of forecast input data for fire behavior models such as FARSITE and FlamMap. It allows the implementation of such models to predict growth and spread of actual fires in real time.
  • Fire-weather forecast products in two spatial resolutions, 12 km and 8 km, over the entire West. This allows studying the impact of spatial resolution on forecast accuracy;
Of all new products deployed by RMC in FY06, the development of the new MFF model is by far the most significant one. Coupling the FORFLUX biophysical model with MM5 resulted in a dramatically improved simulation of the energy available at the land surface to heat the atmosphere. This produced more accurate prediction of the mesoscale weather circulation causing significant improvement in the forecast fields of surface temperature, dew point, and relative humidity. Improvements in forecast wind speed and wind direction were also observed. For the first time since inception of the MM5 weather model (i.e. some 30 years ago), systematic biases in forecasts of temperature and relative humidity have been removed in a physically robust way through the implementation of a comprehensive process-based land-surface model (i.e. FORFLUX). The new MFF model now runs twice a day producing fire-weather forecasts for the entire Western US. Products are available online at:

http://fireweather.sc.egov.usda.gov/mm5_forflux.htm

MFF will soon be implemented into the operational RMC environment at http://fireweather.info

The new MFF model and other products described above are helping fire and smoke managers: (1) assess more accurately fire danger; (2) better plan prescribed burns; (3) allocate more efficiently firefighting resources; (4) quantify more accurately the smoke impact from burns and wildfires. In addition, MFF predicts spatial distribution of ozone deposition and carbon fluxes, and can be used to assess regional impact of tropospheric ozone on forest productivity.

Nikolov, N. and Zeller, K. 2006. Efficient Retrieval of Vegetation Leaf Area Index and Canopy Clumping Factor from Satellite Data to Support Pollutant Deposition Assessments. Environmental Pollution, 141:539-549

Rocky Mountain Research Station
Last Modified: Monday, 28 April 2008 at 17:16:17 EDT (Version 1.0.5)