Operational Wildfire Forecasts in Canada: A Case Study of the 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfire

Smoke from wildfires can have a large impact on regional air quality (AQ) and can expose populations to high levels of pollution, increasing the risk of adverse health effects. Wildfire events are important in regions dominated by forests, such as large parts of Canada. In order to provide valuable guidance to regional AQ forecasters, first responders, and decision makers, Environment and Climate Change Canada has developed an operational AQ wildfire smoke prediction system (FireWork), which includes near-real-time wildfire emissions. The forecast system is run twice per day, at 00 UTC and 12 UTC, to produce numerical AQ forecast guidance with a 48-hour lead time.  FireWork has been used experimentally since 2013 during the wildfire season (April 1st to October 31st) and it became operational in April 2016.  From May 1st, 2016 through July 5th, 2016, Western Canada experienced one of the largest wildfires in its history, burning about 590,000 ha.  The fire caused extensive damage and required the evacuation of nearly 90,000 people from the city of Fort McMurray in northeastern Alberta.  This presentation will give a brief description of the FireWork system and then a performance analysis of forecasted PM2.5 surface concentrations and Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) during the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire event. In addition, because fire plume dynamics affect the spatial and vertical distributions of pollutants near and downwind of the fires, an analysis of forecast sensitivity to different plume-rise parameterizations will also be shown, and FireWork features and limitations as well as ongoing and future work planned will be discussed.