Providing meteorological information for controlled burns at the Savannah River Site

The United States Forest Service (USFS) commonly performs controlled burns of woodlands within the Department of Energy's (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS). To reduce the potentially harmful effects to any onsite activity, it is important that USFS personnel understand current and predicted weather patterns within the area. Current conditions are provided using a series of instrumented towers from various onsite locations, while a prognostic mesoscale model is used to provide forecast information. By providing detailed forecast wind, temperature inversion, and mixing layer height information for a given burn region, fuel and fire management agencies may develop strategies to reduce the risk to both humans and the environment for current and near-current burns at the local level. This report will describe the SRS meteorological tower system used to provide current data, the mesoscale model utilized in generating the forecasts, as well as the products provided to SRS-USFS personnel for use in planning forest burns.