Evaluation of Daysmoke Plume Rise Simulations

Daysmoke is a dynamical-stochastic smoke plume model specific for prescribed burns. One of its applications is to estimate smoke plume rise, an important property for smoke transport and the air quality impact modeling. Daysmoke's performance in plume rise simulation was evaluated in this study using field measurements. Measurements were made with a ceilometer for 20 prescribed burns from mid-winter to early summer during 2009-2011. About half of the burns had burned areas over 1000 acres. The smoke plume height averaged over all burns is about 1 km. Significant seasonal dependence is found with a close value to the average for spring, and lower (higher) by about 0.2 km for winter (summer). Smoke plume height shows fast fluctuations with time for almost all burns. There are also slow fluctuations at the time scales from minutes to tens of minutes, as identified by the wavelet transform. Daysmoke simulations were made for these prescribed burns. The statistical evaluation of Daysmoke's performance in simulating the measured smoke plume rise and other properties is presented. The results are compared with evaluation of other smoke plume rise models.