culminated in many devastating wildfire seasons over the past decade. Fire behavior is becoming more
extreme, with many fires becoming large and hot enough that they create their own weather. Thus,
there is an urgent need for nowcasts of fire behavior for operational decision-making, especially in the
early, critical hours of a fire when intervention is most likely to change the outcome. In those early
hours, satellite-derived fire detections may be the only source of information for initializing fire
behavior nowcasts. The primary goal of this project is the development and dissemination of fire
behavior nowcasts to be used specifically within NOAA’s Next Generation Fire System (NGFS), which
aims to provide high-quality, low-latency products salient to fire forecasters and other operational users
within the fire weather community.
This presentation will report on the work we have done to continue improving nowcasting capabilities
using the open-source Weather Research and Forecasting Fire Spread (WRF-SFIRE) modeling system
initialized with NOAA’s NGFS fire detections. During the first year of the work, more than 3000
nowcasts for wildfire incidents across the continental USA were delivered using a fully automated
process leveraging the WRFx forecasting system. The methodology for creating fire ignition
information to initialize the model from GOES and VIIRS satellite fire detections will be described.
The specifications for fuel loading and fuel moisture will be discussed. The presentation will highlight
recent improvements to the WRF Pre-Processing System and WRF-SFIRE that provide important
improvements in forecast skill. Analysis of the nowcasts and lessons learned from exceptional wildfire
incidents during the year have led to an improved methodology and workflow. These results,
improvements, and their impact on nowcast quality will be a key feature of the presentation.
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