Test Case 4: Bugaboo (Big Turnaround)

Description

A large "single" wildfire complex case that lasted many weeks (~April 16 to June 18, 2007) in eastern Georgia and western Florida.  For this case all fires that became associated are utilized, even for periods when they were separate. Smoke impacted the local population centers.   Unique in the test cases in that it had deep organic soils, which also contributed to the time range of burning.  Smoke impacted population centers across the Southeast and potentially throughout the eastern seaboard.

Purpose

To examine the capability for models to simulate smoke from fires in areas with deep organic duff layers that may smolder for several days in a case with significant data due to its large scale (eastern seaboard) impacts.

Analysis

Model-to-model primarily, model-to-observations for TOTAL COLUMN SMOKE and GROUND CONCENTRATIONS.  Fire information provided.

Time and space scales:

• Horizontal domain is dual due to meteorological input model availability:  high resolution for just the Southeast;  lower resolution for CONUS.  Latter is used for long-range transport issues, particularly along the eastern seaboard.
  
• Some fuels are at higher resolution then the modeling domain, therefore aggregated fuels(e.g. weighted average) will be used to get to the modeling domain resolution (e.g., 1 km2). 
• Temporal modeling scale is hourly on the output levels it is applicable
• There is no time dependency on data availability, this is a post analysis all fire information, fuel moisture, and meteorological conditions are now available. 

Model runs

Output levels

• FUEL LOADING through GROUND CONCENTRATIONS

Input data

• Dates: April 16-June 18, 2007
• Fire information by day and hour (where applicable)
• Meteorological data for the duration of the fire
• Fuel moisture (if applicable)

Intermeditate initialization data

None available.

Guidelines

• No restrictions unless comparing with observational data;  then model must be independent of observational data.
• Spatiotemporal scales should be noted understood for the intercompirson and performance analyses

Status

Some data available through SHRMC.

Notes

Work with S. Goodrick to collect relevant data.

Urbanski et al. have been studying this case, would be good to compare with their model output.