NOAA’s Fire Weather Testbed - User Needs Assessment Team: Integrating Operations and Community Perspectives into Research

There is a growing need for new and improved models, observations, technologies, and tools to support decisions involving wildland fire. To address challenges involving the total fire environment, an operations-to-research-to-operations testbed entirely focused on wildland fire management from both physical and social science perspectives is essential. Accordingly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Global Systems Laboratory has created the Fire Weather Testbed (FWT), a dedicated physical and virtual “knowledge translation platform” where end-users (i.e., meteorologists, incident commanders, land/emergency managers) are invited to learn, test, and evaluate the accessibility, operability, and utility of emergent fire weather-related products and processes using mixed-methods approaches. The FWT serves to translate end-user insights to product developers and the broader research community towards the shared goal of improving products to meet operational needs. Essential and unique to this effort is the FWT User Needs Assessment Team (UNAT). Through continuous interviews, focus groups, and observational field work, the UNAT fosters relationships with end-users to understand their dynamic, time sensitive, and regionally-influenced information and decision support needs related to fire weather across the fire cycle (pre-, during-, and post-fire). The UNAT helps prioritize and design FWT evaluations based on learned user-needs, and UNAT reports back to end-users and broader fire communities to help support and drive the fire weather research agenda, within and beyond NOAA. Here, we overview the progress of UNAT research methodology and highlight active areas of work, focusing on recent end-user assessments of incident meteorologists, or IMETs. IMETs are specially trained and certified National Weather Service meteorologists who provide critical on-site weather observations and forecasts to Incident Management Teams at fire or other complex incidents (e.g., hazardous waste spills). This submission will review data collection activities with IMETs and highlight their job tasks and associated needs as they pertain to fire weather. By understanding the fire weather-related needs of IMETs and other end-users, we can identify and help prioritize a range of products and services to evaluate in the FWT. More broadly, these findings can support the fire weather research community’s efforts to facilitate the transition of research back to operations.