Continuing Development of WoFS-Smoke for Fire-Weather Forecasting

The initial version of WoFS-Smoke has proven very useful in generating valuable short-term (0-6 hour) forecasts of environments favorable for wildfire development and the smoke generated from those fires. The initial version of the system has been used in both the Fire Weather Testbed and Southern Plains NWS offices who have provided positive feedback. However, this feedback has also produced several important recommendations for WoFS-Smoke development to further improve the system and its products. We describe several updates to the system made during the past year based on these recommendations. The first is new and modified display products. We now include fire weather favorability products such as the red flag threat index, and new smoke related products such as visibility and air quality. Additional probabilistic forecast tools have also been developed. On going improvements to the WoFS-Smoke configuration include using FRP retrievals from the Next Generation Fire System, assimilation of biomass burning debris Doppler radial velocity and coupling the 1-D plume injection height model back into the WRF analysis. Preliminary results from these updates show the potential for significant improvements in wildfire smoke forecasts. This includes a much greater ability to forecast the impact of a wildfire on the surrounding environment. Results from several recent high impact wildfires will be presented along with plans for continued evolution and application of WoFS-Smoke.