Extended Abstract (792K)6.6
Real-Time Mesoscale Model Forecasts for Fire and Smoke Management: 2001
Sue A. Ferguson, USDA Forest Sevice, Seattle, WA
The Northwest Regional Modeling Consortium has been supporting the real-time predictions of mesoscale weather since 1993. The consortium includes local, state, and federal agencies with interests in air quality, smoke management, fire weather, water resources, hazard weather, and transportation. While on-going improvements to model physics and numerics have increased predictive accuracy and resolution, value-added products continue to attract users. These include ensemble forecasts, graphical displays of critical fire and smoke weather parameters, calculation of fire and smoke indexes, and coupled MM5 - smoke dispersion models. A new fire and smoke meteorology web page is being designed for MM5 northwest that includes mapped graphics of surface relative humidity, surface wind, planetary boundary level, ventilation index, Fosberg's fire weather index, the Haines index, NFDRS index values (initialized and predicted), next-day planned prescribed fires, previous-days accomplished fires, and smoke concentration observations. Also, soundings, meteograms, and time-height profiles, are available for critical point locations and links are included to ftp transfer sites for NFSpuff-MM5 files and NFSpuff program files, NWS fire-weather offices, regional and national fire coordination centers, IMPROVE network, WRCC RAWS, BlueSky - "one atmosphere" web site, and the Rains - "one environment" web site. In addition to fire and smoke related products, consortium efforts have coupled MM5 with a hydro-meteorological model for real-time water resource runoff predictions and with an air quality model for real-time ozone predictions.
Session 6, Predictive Services
Wednesday, 14 November 2001, 3:20 PM-5:20 PM
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