BlueSky Playground: A Web-Based Smoke Modeling Decision Support Tool

Fire exclusion across the United States is a major contributor to wide-scale changes in forest structure, alterations in species composition, and accumulation of forest floor material. Fuels treatments, including prescribed fires and pile burns, have become increasingly important as fire seasons continue to worsen in severity. In addition, standards for particulate pollution continue to tighten, requiring land managers who approve or conduct prescribed fires to manage smoke production carefully to minimize smoke impacts in sensitive areas. BlueSky Playground is an interactive, web-based tool for estimating smoke emissions and resulting downwind smoke concentrations from wildfires, prescribed fires, and pile burns. It connects to fuel loading, fuel consumption, fire emissions, and smoke dispersion models using the BlueSky Framework, providing access to powerful modeling tools in an easy to-use interface. BlueSky Playground is part of the Wildland Fire Decision Support System Air Quality suite (WFDSS-AQ) and has been revamped recently to provide more useful tools and an updated interface for both wildfire smoke modeling and prescribed burn planning, including access to regional high-resolution forecast meteorology in some areas. The resulting system both provides better user control over parameters affecting fire emissions, and allows for more dispersion modeling options.