BlueSky Playground for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Web-Based Smoke Modeling for Military Installations in the Southeastern United States

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is one of the largest landowners in the federal government. DOD uses prescribed fire to prepare sites for military training, to reduce hazardous fuels and fire risk, and to mimic the ecological role of fire. As standards for particulate pollution continue to tighten and citizens' concern about smoke continue to grow, land managers who approve or conduct prescribed fires must manage smoke production carefully to minimize smoke impacts in sensitive areas. BlueSky Playground (BSP) for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is a variant of the original BSP that is designed specifically for military installations across the southeastern United States. It is an interactive, web-based tool for exploring smoke emissions and resulting downwind smoke concentrations from prescribed fires. The USACE BlueSky Playground differs from the original Playground in that it incorporates Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) fuelbeds representative of the vegetation types on Southeastern military bases, and the latest version of CONSUME (4.2). It also features a completely redesigned user interface that is intuitive and simple to navigate, allows users to interact with the output data, and can generate a PDF report for download. We will demonstrate the USACE BlueSky Playground and show how it can be used in prescribed fire planning, using Fort Gordon, a U.S. Army installation in Georgia, as a test case.