An Integrated Warning Team Approach to Fire Warnings

The mission of firefighting and emergency management agencies, as well as the National Weather Service (NWS), intersect at the “protection of life and property”. While tornadoes, blizzards, and floods occur independent of life, wildland fire cannot exist outside the biota of vegetative fuels. Thus, physical processes that influence wildland fire are truly multidisciplinary, and response to wildfire crises requires cooperation across bureaucratic agencies. For this reason, state, federal, and tribal wildland fire institutions, and their incident management teams, are an interagency conglomeration of responders with multifaceted expertise and responsibilities. In spite of the multitude of agencies responsible for wildland fire planning, suppression, and mitigation, the lack of fire-specific warning protocols to influence public and first responder safety during particularly dangerous wildfire incidents has garnered calls for action following recent high-profile national fire disasters. Meanwhile, scientific knowledge of dangerous wildfire environments, as well as the remote sensing technology to detect and infer characteristics of fire ignition, behavior, and spread, have dramatically improved. Deployment of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-R series of weather satellites has revolutionized operational wildland fire detection and monitoring. NWS forecasters at participating field offices have successfully leveraged GOES-16/17 to provide real-time notifications of wildfires since 2016, and in many cases, hot spot notifications were received prior to local emergency 911 calls allowing for rapid responses to fires credited with saving lives and property.

While not initially applied to fire, the NWS and partnering agencies have also adopted an Integrated Warning Team (IWT) approach to obtain effective messaging and mitigating actions toward many weather hazards. To date, the IWT has operated through pre-event meetings designed to facilitate critical partner engagement and build trusted relationships that form the basis of successful impact-based decision support. To evolve the NWS and build a Weather Ready Nation, however, IWT concepts must extend beyond the controlled environment of scripted scenarios played out in workshops. These concepts must mature from philosophical sandtable exercises and permeate real-time operational warning decisions. In this vein, renowned pyrohistorian and author, Stephen Pyne, wrote that we must “address how fire really exists, and not how select sciences can handle it” and “if an agency stays only within its jurisdictional boundaries, it will fail” to successfully address the complexities of wildland fire response. Thus, the multidisciplinary nature of wildfire emergencies presents a unique opportunity to exercise IWT concepts in a real-world collaborative interagency approach to effective warning messaging.

This presentation details the operationalization of collaborated IWT processes for interagency fire warnings (FRWs) that include: 1) pre-fire coordination of fire environments known to support extreme fire behavior, 2) remote sensing-informed identification of potentially dangerous wildfires communicated to forestry/emergency management agencies, 3) ground-truth corroboration of local wildfire threats via on-site forestry/emergency management agencies, 4) state forestry requests for FRW issuance, and 5) subsequent Wireless Emergency Alert activation for evacuation information. The development of science-based warning decisional guidance, as well as multiagency agreements for partner requests and defined procedures for coordinated warning processes in compliance with agency directives documented here, demonstrate a path toward implementing effective fire-scale warnings. Operational application of coordinated fire/emergency management-NWS FRWs will be demonstrated through case examples that occurred in Oklahoma in 2022 and compared to a timeline of legacy FRW issuance, traditionally issued only at the request of local emergency managers once evacuations were in progress. This proactive, collaborative, science and remote sensing-based process, where multiple local, state, tribal, and federal agencies efficiently work to message authoritative hazard information with one voice, represents the epitome of applied IWT ideals and may serve as a prototype for future fire-based warning systems.