WASHINGTON, May 28 (UPI) -- A combination of near-real-time satellite data and advanced software is helping academic and government researchers improve forecasts on how wildfires will affect weather, air quality and other factors, a researcher said Tuesday.
The Fire Locating and Modeling of Burning Emissions or FLAMBE project is a collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Navy, the University of Alabama and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
FLAMBE uses two NOAA satellites in stationary orbits to provide simultaneous coverage of the entire Western Hemisphere, said Jeffrey Reid, a researcher at the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego. Every 30 minutes, data from the satellites feeds into the program, Reid told a session at the American Geophysical Union's spring meeting.
The software takes the location and size of wildfires or agricultural burns and generates an estimate of smoke plumes, Reid said. It builds a four-day forecast of where the smoke will spread.
During tests in the Amazon River basin, researchers fed detailed analyses of small-scale physics and infrared radiation effects back into the system at several points. This continuously improved its prediction ability, which originally overestimated smoke production near the edge of deforested zones, he said.
"While we emphasize the relationship between smoke and weather, we are also working to estimate burned areas, smoke fluxes, radioactive impacts and climate effects, (as well as) assess regional air quality," Reid said.
In addition to aiding firefighting efforts, the program will help flight planning for both military and civilian pilots. NASA expects to use the program's calculations in global climate studies and for cross-calibration with another fire-spotting satellite, which provides more detailed information on a twice-daily basis.
FLAMBE's basic fire-spotting capabilities have spotted blazes within 15 minutes of their estimated start times, Reid said.
The software looks promising, especially in automating analysis currently done on a case-by-case basis, said Kevin Lavin, executive director of the National Weather Association in Charlottesville, Va. Further study is needed to determine how many applications will benefit from the software, he told United Press International in a phone conversation.
"If this product does provide the detailed movement of the smoke and haze correctly, it will make (air quality) forecasts a little easier," Lavin said.
Meteorologists take smoke and haze into account when forecasting several weather elements, including precipitation and temperature shifts, Lavin said. Smoke can imitate cloud cover in terms of raising temperatures and then prevent nighttime cooling, he said.
Other presentations at the AGU meeting suggested large wildfire smoke plumes can retard normal precipitation processes, leading to less frequent but heavier rainfall.
The FLAMBE team is upgrading the software package to handle other sensor inputs and match the software's products to existing geographical grids, Reid said. The repositioning of a third geostationary satellite should expand the program's coverage into Southeast Asia, where smoke plumes play a major role in summer weather, he said.
