NOAA Fire Weather Research Program and Fire Weather Activities at NOAA's Weather Program Office

The NOAA’s Weather Program Office (WPO) at NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) collaborates with NOAA’s OAR Laboratories, NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS), NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), and emergency managers from across the fire weather community. We have run a collaborative and integrated Fire Weather Research Program, including a Fire Weather Testbed since 2022. Although NOAA has been forecasting the spread of smoke from fires for many years, the focus on fire activity and interactions between smoke and weather are relatively new. In support of WPO’s mission, various WPO Programs have become increasingly involved in supporting fire weather research activities. After the first time Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) on Fire Weather & Atmospheric Composition Competition in the Fiscal Year (FY) of 2022, WPO provides another NOFO specifically on Fire Weather in FY24 in order to seek for research and development proposals that improve fire weather forecast information and delivery, and support new research into the coupled Unified Forecast System (UFS) for the short-term fire-atmosphere modeling systems.

We will present the Research Program priorities as well as an overview of the three funded projects supported by WPO. The selected projects balance among the topics to advance a robust fire modeling forecast system, focusing on the next generation UFS, particularly the regional system (Rapid Refresh Forecast System; RRFS) or the Warn on Forecast (WoF) system to model fire-weather and smoke for short time-scales (hours to days). These projects will develop and evaluate the WoFS-Smoke system, improve the aerosol representation and couple to microphysics in the fine resolution storm-scale RRFS, and as well enhance representations of wildfire-Atmospheric Boundary Layer interactions in the UFS through parameterization development, emissions modeling, and air quality impact assessment.

Working closely with the UFS short-range weather application team and the Fire Weather Testbed, the Earth Prediction Innovation Center program is working toward establishing a community-friendly end-to-end testing and development environment for features in RRFS-Smoke and Dust model, RRFS-Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ), and a coupled fire-atmosphere model within the UFS framework (UFS-Fire) with documentation, user’s guide, and tutorials. These projects will improve UFS fire weather capabilities for wildfire detection and prediction while co-developing products and services alongside fire weather stakeholders.