Development and implementation of a uniform national verification system for the 7-day significant fire potential product

In the spring and summer of 2004, Southern California Predictive Services developed the 7-day significant fire potential product, which was subsequently used in all of California for the remainder of the fire season. This product relies on a fuel dryness index based on weather and fire danger elements as input. It has been adopted by the Predictive Services Group as an important decision-support tool, and in 2007 will be used by all Geographic Center Coordination Centers (GACCs). In conjunction with the development of this product, the Desert Research Institute (DRI) Program for Climate, Ecosystem and Fire Applications (CEFA) has been developing a RAWS-MOS (model output statistics) product for all of the GACCs except for the Pacific Northwest Area, which already has an established set of MOS equations. Equations are developed for 00 and 12 UTC National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) North American Model (NAM) for both summer and winter seasons. Twice daily 10-day forecasts of maximum and minimum temperature, relative humidity and dew point, wind speed and direction, ERC, BI, IC, SC, 100-hour and 1000-hour fuel moisture, and the Haines index are produced operationally at CEFA. The forecasts are posted on the DRI ftp server for automated electronic retrieval by the agencies, and posted on the CEFA web site for direct viewing.

The project has been expanded to develop and implement a uniform national verification system for the 7-day significant fire potential product for all GACCs. The primary objectives of this project are to: 1) develop a uniform national verification system for the significant fire potential product and 2) implement an operational verification system to provide daily updates of forecast results to allow for trend and control monitoring. Both statistics and graphical displays are being developed. This presentation will discuss the development and implementation of this verification system.