> Research Highlight: New Alaska Wildfire Smoke Forecast in Time for Fire Season
Research Highlight:
New Alaska Wildfire Smoke Forecast in Time for Fire Season
A new wildfire smoke forecast product for Alaska, developed by the
Air Resources Laboratory (ARL), began its experimental testing phase by
the National Weather Service (NWS) on May 27th. Forecasts products are
posted daily on the National Digital Guidance Database web page. This
new product expands the existing Continental United States (CONUS) smoke
forecast over Alaska using a finer 12-km resolution North American
Mesoscale (NAM) model rather than the coarser resolution Global
Forecasting System (GFS) model. The accuracy of the forecasts will be
evaluated during the experimental testing phase over the 2008 fire
season.
The current operational smoke transport and dispersion forecasts from
agricultural burns and wild fires have been produced by NOAA over the
CONUS for the last year. ARL's HYSPLIT dispersion model is run over the
entire country once-a-day using the daily 0600 UTC NAM and GFS
meteorological forecast. Hourly average output maps of primary PM2.5 air
concentration are produced using actual fire locations identified from
satellite observations during the previous day. The dispersion
simulation consists of two parts, a 24 h analysis simulation run for the
previous day and a 48 h forecast simulation. In the operational
forecast, fire locations outside of the NAM domain such as Alaska and
Central America, use the coarser resolution global model data for their
meteorological forecast. In this new experimental version, an
independent smoke forecast is run for the Alaska region using a special
extract of the NAM forecast. The use of a NAM extract permits a much
faster calculation because most of the over-ocean grid points can be
excluded thereby speeding up the calculation.
The new wildfire smoke forecast product allows the NWS to provide
higher spatial resolution forecasts for Alaska that are comparable to
the rest of the CONUS. These higher resolution forecasts are important
for capturing the terrain complexity near major population centers in
Alaska.