Integrating Fire Weather Forecast System Verification into METplus

The ability of a fire weather or wildfire modeling system to accurately represent fire behavior is critical to support decision making by end users. There are many different fire prediction systems available, and advancements are being made on coupled atmospheric-wildfire systems. To allow consistent evaluation of the many available models, users would benefit from a standardized method of verification. Such a verification system would also benefit operations and the issuing of fire-related products by the National Weather Service (NWS) and other agencies. It would also support the deployment of Incident Meteorologists (IMETs).

To this end, this project is working to incorporate fire weather use cases into the enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) system. METplus is a verification framework developed by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) and was selected to be the foundation of the Unified Forecast System (UFS) evaluation and diagnostics. Use cases provide example workflows to demonstrate how METplus may be used to complete a certain verification objective. Through collaboration with NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) and the NWS Cheyenne office, a dataset of wildfire cases is being assembled and use cases being built using this dataset, including verification of both atmospheric parameters and wildfire spread. With the fire behavior model WRF-Fire being incorporated into UFS, wildfire verification is a timely addition to METplus. The use cases include continuous statistics, categorical statistics, and spatial verification methods for both atmospheric forecasts and fire spread predictions and will be made available to the community via METplus.