NOAA Fire Weather Research Program and Fire Weather Activities at NOAA's Weather Program Office

NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Line Office is establishing a collaborative and integrated Fire Weather Research Program, including a Fire Weather Testbed. The program includes activities within the OAR Laboratories as well as research opportunities for the community to collaborate with NOAA. Although NOAA has been forecasting the spread of smoke from fires for many years, the focus on fire activity and interactions between smoke and weather are relatively new. We will present the Research Program priorities as well as an overview of the early research projects supported by NOAA’s Weather Program Office (WPO) and research Laboratories.

WPO cultivates, funds, and transitions collaborative weather research that results in accurate and actionable weather information for all. In support of WPO’s mission, various WPO Programs have become increasingly involved in supporting fire weather research activities.

WPO included fire weather research priorities for the first time in the Fiscal Year 2022 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) Fire Weather & Atmospheric Composition Competition in anticipation of potential increased funding for fire weather research. Through WPO’s FY22 NOFO, one project was funded starting in the Fall of 2022 that will integrate the WRF-FIRE module into NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS). This project will allow the UFS to have the capability to explicitly simulate fire-atmosphere feedbacks for the first time.

Fiscal Year 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding supports an additional four fire weather projects, the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) to provide Unified Forecast System (UFS) fire weather systems to the community, and advances fire weather-focused social science research. Through collaboration with the Fire Weather Testbed, these projects will improve UFS fire weather capabilities for wildfire detection and prediction while co-developing products and services alongside fire weather stakeholders. These projects will improve the ability to provide timely and accurate fire weather, fire behavior, and smoke forecast guidance to safeguard lives and property and manage downstream air quality impacts. Fire weather forecast capabilities will be improved with a new Significant Fire Parameter and deep learning models predicting extreme fire behavior. EPIC will work closely with the UFS fire weather application development and testbed teams to establish a public-facing, end-to-end testing and development environment for Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS)-Smoke, RRFS-CMAQ, and UFS-Fire, and to support the releases of RRFS-Smoke, RRFS-CMAQ, and the UFS-Fire with documentation, user’s guides, tutorials, and training. The WPO Social Science Program in partnership with the Global Systems Laboratory is ensuring that as the science and technical development advances stakeholders are part of the co-production process to ensure that the services are understood and support fire decision making.