The BlueSkyRAINS Smoke Prediction System

BlueSky is a framework linking together weather prediction systems with the latest available fire science and air quality models to predict smoke concentrations from prescribed fire, wildland fire, and agricultural fire. The EPA Region 10 developed the sophisticated Rapid Access Information System (RAINS) user interface. Partnering these two systems led to the BlueSkyRAINS (BSR) decision support system (DSS). Many scientific improvements have been added to the system: improved wildfire fire behavior, burn system integration with the Oregon Department of Forestry, linkage with wildfire activity data from Canada, implementation of fuel loading estimations for Canada, new morning update runs to model smoke from approved burns (a subset of the previous days proposed burns), and improved fire emission models such as BURNUP and FEPS. These improvements are applied to the BSR-Northwest and the BSR-West domains. Then, NASA has funded improving BSR as a DSS by incorporating NASA satellite products for system initialization and evaluation. Finally, the emission processing portion of the BlueSky framework (“BlueSky-EM”) will be used for the first time operationally in the summer of 2005 to send speciated wildfire emissions to an Eulerian air quality prediction system, AIRPACT, which uses the SMOKE/CMAQ system to predict air quality for the Northwest. Details regarding these developments, how they are used and how they improve the BSR smoke prediction system will be presented.