Test Case 6: Northwest Regional Prescribed Burns

Description

The Pacific Northwest has some of the most developed prescribed fire inventories available.  We use these on a regional basis to examine prescribed burning statistics including smoke impacts during a prescribed fire season (Spring 2008).

Purpose

To examine smaller prescribed fire burning and model performance.  To examine different prescribed fire information sources, durations, and time rate of consumption theories.

Analysis

Model-to-model primarily.  All output levels.

A variety of basic fire information ground sources exist, including both planned burns from FETS, WA DNR, OR ODF, MT/ID RAZU, and Washington State University's ClearSky.   These can be compared to satellite data-streams of fire location.

Time and space scales:

• Spatial resolution of the domain will be on the order of 4 km2 (dictated by available meteorological modeling data) the domain will cover Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana
• The temporal output will be on the order of daily and hourly
• Prescribed burn seasons during Spring 2008 will be the focus of the modeling efforts
  

Model runs

Output levels

• ALL;  particular emphasis on BASIC FIRE INFORMATION, SPECIATED EMISSIONS, VERTICAL PLUME PROFILES, and GROUND CONCENTRATIONS.

Input data

• Meteorological data

Intermeditate initialization data

• BASIC FIRE INFORMATION: location, total size, duration
• FUELS: type, moisture

Guidelines

• No restrictions unless comparing with observational data;  then model must be independent of observational data.

• Runs starting with BASIC FIRE INFORMATION must use test case intermediate data (see above).
  

Status

Some model runs done by automated smoke forecast systems.

Notes