The Department of Commerce and NOAA announced today that approximately $15 million has been provided through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to construct and deploy a new suite of fire weather observing systems in high-risk locations in the Western United States to support wildfire prediction, detection and monitoring.
The investments support four distinct but related components of a regional fire weather observing system that relies on different technologies and approaches with the goal of improving wildfire prediction, detection and monitoring from the regional to local scales.
"Catastrophic wildfires threaten the lives and livelihoods of many communities across the country, which is why the Biden-Harris administration has invested hundreds of millions to keep families safe from wildfires by improving wildfire science, monitoring, and prediction," said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. "With the investments we're announcing today we are improving early evacuation warnings, strengthening firefighter resources and helping protect impacted areas."
Over the past two decades, warmer temperatures and lengthy droughts have increased fire risk across much of the country, while more homes continue to be built in harm's way. These trends have placed a premium on understanding weather patterns that create conditions that are ripe for wildfire, and on deploying better tools to observe atmospheric conditions during fires and post-fire rain events. Among these new tools are uncrewed aerial systems that can make measurements in situations too hazardous for crewed platforms like airplanes or helicopters.
"These investments will advance wildfire weather research, speeding the transition of state-of-the-art observational tools to operations," said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. "These new tools and systems, all of which will be deployed in 2025, will provide immediate benefits in terms of improved prediction of fire risk, and insights into the interplay between weather and fire behavior."
The foundation of the system will be four new ground-based observing stations built in fire-prone regions of the Western United States. Existing federal properties with established NOAA presence near Idaho Falls, Idaho and Desert Rock, Nevada, were selected for two of the observing sites. NOAA is still finalizing the location of the other two in California and Washington state. The total cost of the project is $7.3 million.
During active fires, observations from state-of-the-art suites of research quality instruments at these sites will be available to support operational decisions made by emergency managers, and will also improve numerical weather prediction models that are run every day, providing high-resolution forecasts on what might occur in the hours to days ahead.
The deployments will demonstrate the capabilities of these systems in different geographical and climatic regions, while the data will help researchers and meteorologists characterize and understand conditions that contribute to fires and their evolution. The knowledge gained will improve weather prediction models that are used to provide forecast guidance for wildland fire potential.
In a second project, NOAA will construct two mobile observation systems, which will use lidars, spectrometers and other instruments to provide observations of temperature, humidity, wind and smoke plume characteristics. These same instruments will be in the four fixed stations.
These new mobile systems can be deployed upwind of active fires to better understand how weather influences fire, and downwind to understand how fire influences weather, increasing observations of the interaction between fire and weather. They could also be deployed to other wildfire-prone regions to provide observations that will be used to improve predictive models. The cost of the project is $3.9 million.
A third project will provide a new mobile, scanning, polarized radar system to deploy to significant wildland fire events to make measurements of smoke properties during the fire. It will also be available to monitor precipitation over or near burn scars to help meteorologists assess flooding and debris flow risk. This data will be communicated to emergency managers, on-scene responders and forecasters, and will serve as a resource for future research for years to come. The cost of this project is $2 million.
In addition, drones and measuring instruments worth $1.8 million have been purchased to create a fleet of uncrewed aerial systems that will support new, research-quality observations of weather and air quality conditions for NOAA researchers that will be available to support wildfire fighting operations. The new systems can be deployed to active wildfires across the country to collect data from areas that are currently inaccessible, such as at elevations adjacent to very complex terrain or very close to active fires.
The mobile and uncrewed systems can be deployed independently or positioned strategically to yield a more comprehensive picture of how weather influences a wildfire -- and how fire influences weather.
Data from the fixed sites, mobile facilities and uncrewed aerial systems will be transmitted in near real-time back to a NOAA data hub in Boulder, Colorado, where it will be displayed online for the benefit of fire weather forecasters, firefighters, researchers and other interested parties.
Additional information about this initiative is available on the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory website.
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