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Last Update 03/21/07 |
January 29, 2003 - Dr. Scott Goodrick, Forestry Service At their January monthly meeting, the North Florida chapter welcomed Dr. Scott Goodrick, a research meteorologist with the USDA Forest Service in Athens, Georgia, for a speech and lecture on the many aspects of fire weather. Prior to entering the field of fire meteorology, Dr. Goodrick’s expertise lied in the field of sea-ice boundary layer interactions, including a year of study at the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) at Florida State University. Currently, he is primarily involved with modeling fires and smoke and particle dispersion on grids as small as two meters. Fire meteorology, as Dr. Goodrick described, is not all that different than other applied fields of meteorology. Meteorologists working alongside firefighters aim to provide wind, temperature, and precipitation forecasts for the upcoming days and hours to ensure the safety of people and property that may be directly affected by the fire now or in the near future. The fire environment, comprised of the interactions between topography, available fuels, and the weather, largely affects this process of fire weather forecasting. In order to provide these forecasts, several tools are available to meteorologists, including various fire danger rating indices derived from weather observations taken daily by reporting stations in the Remote Automated Weather Sensing (RAWS) network. Future state products are also available, including those released by the Geographic Coordination Centers (GACC) and in the form of daily fire weather forecasts provided by the National Weather Service. Examples of these forecasts include a daily fire weather forecast, a smoke management forecast, a point forecast, an hourly spot forecast, as well as the reports from incident meteorologists along the front lines of a fire-fighting effort. Though fire meteorology is, in many aspects, similar to many other fields of applied meteorology, several subtle aspects exist that are specific to forecasting for fires. These differences in the fire weather forecast, ranging from boundary layer conditions such as the mixing height, transport winds, and dispersion index to indicators of future change such as the Haines (or Lower Atmospheric Severity) index, allow meteorologists to better describe the current and future fire environment in a meteorological context. However, not only are the various differences in fire meteorology, there are also differences in the types of fires that these meteorologists much forecast. Five important classifications of fires exist: ground fires, which involve the soil burning; surface fires, which involve the burning of foliage along the surface; torching, where individual trees are being burned from the ground up; passive crown fires, fires which involve many acts of torching that follow along the ground as the surface fire does; and active crown fires, which are like passive crown fires but tend to move with the wind as opposed to the surface fire. Further distinctions can be made in these categories, including wind-driven and plume-dominated fires. As part of the lecture, Dr. Goodrick showed footage taken by a news helicopter hovering over a fire in 1998 in Brevard County, along Florida’s east coast. This video demonstrated yet another fascinating aspect of fires - firewhirls. These spires of fire can reach many hundreds of feet into the sky and are often accompanied by tornadic-like rotations in smoke plumes and surface fires into the whirls themselves. Firewhirls such as the one demonstrated bring about an increased rate of burning and spotting, can cause reburns, and spew ashes and embers for up to several miles in all directions. Over time, research completed by meteorologists such as Dr. Goodrick has identified several critical patterns that appear in active fire weather seasons. These patterns, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, key synoptic-level impacts such as persistent high-pressure systems and affects of frontal passage, and mesoscale-level impacts such as slope and valley winds, thunderstorm outflow boundaries, and, along the coast of Florida, interactions with afternoon seabreeezes have provided incident meteorologists with the tools to improve their spot forecasts and maintain the safety of firefighters on the front lines and residents potentially affected by sudden changes in a fire’s movement. Recent technological advances have also aided in understanding the dynamics behind fires and the dispersion of smoke. The development of high-resolution numerical prediction models such as the MM5 has improved weather and fire danger forecasts and has provided better input to fire weather behavior models designed to model fires. Groups such as the one that Dr. Goodrick is a part of, the Southern High-Resolution Modeling Consortium (SHRMC), use these models at four to eight kilometer resolutions in order to better understand and thus be able to better predict fire behavior given many varying aspects such as topography and available fuels. While no one wants to be impacted by a fire, it is inevitable that someone will eventually be impacted by something related to fire meteorology. It is the goal of researchers and meteorologists such as Dr. Goodrick to minimize the impacts of these fires on people, property, and the natural environment. As new technological advances are made, such a goal is not only feasible but also likely in the near future. For more information on the USDA Forest Service and work being put into researching fire meteorology, please visit the USDA Forest Service’s website at http://www.fs.fed.us/. |
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