Development and Evaluation of Fire Weather Products in the WoFS

Recent developments in the Warn-on-Forecast System (WoFS) include new capabilities for forecasting atmospheric conditions that are favorable for the spread of wildfires and the smoke generated by these fires. Wildfires and their impacts are considered one form of high impact weather and extending WoFS to improve forecasts of these impacts is a natural evolution of the basic system. Several products have been developed and include a new formulation of the Red Flag Threat Index (RFTI), ensemble mean and probabilistic smoke concentration, smoke affected thermodynamic conditions, and new synthetic satellite imagery that includes smoke aerosols in addition to clouds. This version of the system, known as WoFS-Smoke, has been transitioned to cloud-based computing and run in realtime. As with the traditional WoFS, a regional domain is selected daily based on where the high impact weather is expected to occur. In this case, it is centered around areas where conditions are favorable for wildfire development and/or in an area where active wildfires are ongoing. Forecasts of fire and smoke products are initiated at 30 minute intervals and extend out to 6 hours, with 5 minute forecast output intervals. This high temporal resolution forecast output is vital to sampling the rapidly changing nature of wildfire impacts. Initial testing of these products in an operational environment was conducted as part of the Fire Weather Testbed in Boulder, CO. Early evaluation of the system and recommendations for future development will be discussed.