Maps and info to help you stay informed during fire season

[joeray]

Be alert for changing conditions! I recommend that everyone bookmark this link and check it regularly. Be patient, and wait for it to load. This is a full featured map to aid in your fire situational awareness for North America. Satellite fire detections and perimeters update daily. Study the legend, and with the sidebar you can turn off the clutter (Emerging WF). Zoom into an area you are most interested in, then resave the link.

National Fire Situational Awareness

maps.wildfire.gov

InciWeb is also a good tool, but it's not nearly as inclusive. It does however give much better perspective to a current fire situation that it does cover.

Home | InciWeb

Homepage for Inciweb

inciweb.wildfire.gov

Here's another useful map, this time air quality. Areas with unhealthful air quality will vary quite rapidly depending on the wind direction and speed. If you're not familiar with PurpleAir, they monitor personal (as opposed to gov't) air sensors, and there's a lot of them out there. This map also covers multiple states, and can be quite useful planning your summer outings, especially on the west coast during fire season. Adjust the map to suit your needs, then resave the link.

US EPA PM2.5 Air Quality Standards Interactive Map by PurpleAir

Watch: With two minute updates, The US EPA PM2.5 Air Quality Index (AQI) is a number used by US government agencies to communicate to the public how polluted the air currently is or how polluted it is forecast to become.

map.purpleair.com

 

[OTG Ben]

This is great, I typically watch the Cal Fire Incidents page, so it's nice to have something that isn't constrained to a single state!

 

[OTG Ben]

Another app that I came across recently, and I've been using quite a bout is Watch Duty. Also, Gaia GPS has a number of very helpful layers including:

• Historical Wildfires (good to see if your route passes through a recent burn zone)
• Current Wildfires (I prefer to use Watch Duty though)
• NOAA Smoke Forecasts (this one is very helpful!)

 

[joeray]

I'd like to see the exact link that you use for the NOAA smoke forecast. After considerable searching I couldn't find anything that was all that useful to me. I did find one animated forecast on a map, but it didn't even cover a 24-hour period.

It's interesting to see just how far the Park fire is impacting air quality. Of course you'd kind of expect that with a 400K acre wildfire. I'm not going anywhere near the Park fire this year, and that includes Shasta.

 

[OTG Ben]

These are all map layers in Gaia GPS,but you should be able to access NOAA data on their website as well.

 

[joeray]

Thanks, now I understand what you were referring to. These are Gaia static layers, so they are missing all the information in between each control point. They are integrating the HRRR smoke model, but at a very basic level with only three forecast points. To take this a step further, you need to be able to see each control point on an interactive map with an animated overlay based on the hourly HRRR. This will allow you to see trends.

NOAA has a dedicated page for the HRRR smoke model.

NOAA - GSL Data Visualization

On the sidebar check "Near Surface Smoke". Below that you'll see a date range. Select the most recent model run with a time stamp of either 00, 06, 12, or 18Z as these forecast cycles go out 48 hours. Zoom into the area you are interested in, and hit the play button. It will need to load the data you requested, so be patient. You may also want to decrease the frames per second slider. All times are Zulu, subtract 7 hours for Pacific time.