Prescribed Fire and Smoke Planner: Development of a Planning and Decision Support System for Prescribed Burning

Prescribed burning is a critical tool in efforts to manage the threats of extreme wildfire, and to restore fire-ecosystem balance. Prescribed fire behavior and smoke management objectives require burning when weather and fuel conditions are within specific bounds. Determining safe and effective bounds that have the maximum likelihood of occurring and understanding when the resulting burn windows will occur are likely to be critical to increasing prescribed burning at the scale needed to successfully address the growing threats of extreme wildfire over fire-prone US regions.

Here, we discuss progress on a planning and decision support system designed to mine historical weather records to provide this understanding in a way that is tailorable to a specific location and manager’s needs. At the time of abstract submission, this tool offers climatological burn window evaluations based on specification of bounds for any number of presently supported fire-behavior (e.g., near surface wind speed, relative humidity, temperature, and equilibrium moisture content) and smoke management-related (e.g., transport wind speed and direction, mixing height, ventilation index) environmental conditions, which have been extracted from an 11 year archive of hourly, 4km-horizontal resolution, operational forecasts from the University of Washington's Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model covering the northwestern US, and 30 years of hourly, 25km-horizontal resolution data from the ERA5 reanalysis over the conterminous US. The intent of this tool is to help facilitate prescribed burning nationwide.