Great Lakes Fire and Fuels Web Portal

The Great Lakes Fire and Fuels web portal (http://glffc.utah.edu) has been designed for wildland fire professionals and provides access to retrospective, current, and forecast information regarding weather and fuel conditions in the Great Lakes region. This effort has been undertaken at the University of Utah with the support and direction of Michigan DNRE, Minnesota DNR, and Wisconsin DNR and under the auspices of the Great Lakes Forest Fire Compact. Map displays, tabular listings, and time series graphics are available in a variety of formats.

Fuel state information is initialized at stations at the beginning of the fire season and can be updated as needed throughout the year. Observed station values of temperature, wind, moisture, and precipitation are then used following the guidelines of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS) to calculate various indices at daily and hourly intervals. Hourly analyses of temperature, wind, relative humidity, and precipitation are obtained from the NCEP Real Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) on a 5 km grid nationally. CFFDRS indices for each gridpoint within the Great Lakes region are calculated daily at 18 UTC. Forecast weather values for 6-hour periods out to 2 days are obtained four times per day from the National Weather Service National Digital Forecast Database on the same 5 km grid available for the RTMA. The gridded values are displayed as graphical images with the capability to rollover and see specific values at each gridpoint. The nearest gridded values to specific stations are used to compute the station forecast values.

Developer and user evaluations of the capabilities and limitations of the web portal to monitor current and forecast conditions will be presented.