To Incorporate Wildfire Burning Information in NWP

NCEP is responsible for providing fire weather guidance to the NWS Incident Meteorologists deployed at the fire sites. In 2011, NCEP is running a 1.3 km Fire weather model forecast. It is observed that wildfires dramatically change land surface physical properties: such as surface albedo, surface emissivity, surface roughness, surface temperature and soil moisture in a very short period. Therefore, burnt area and fire behavior processes should be incorporated in NWP models. To prepare for the incorporation, burnt area has been derived from MODIS, AVHRR and GOES remote sensing data operationally since August 2012 by NESDIS Star Program. Two products are available. (1) A high resolution data (1/1.33 km) is produced twice a day when MODIS, AVHRR and GOES are all available, the data covers the North American Area between 20°N and 70°N; (2) A relative lower resolution data (8/12 km) is produced four times a day when only GOES is available, the data covers the area from the equator to the north pole. These two products are in Lambert conformal projection, and in GRIB2 Format, the unit is in percent. A preprocess program is created to update the surface physical properties based on the burnt area in nmmb model. Several numerical sensitivity tests were conducted. Primary outputs show that the incorporation of the product in NWP can improve model performance.