Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot Gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

HTTPS

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Multiagency Ensemble Forecast of Wildfire Air Quality In The United States: Toward Community Consensus of Early Warning

Abstract

Wildfires pose increasing risks to human health and properties in North America. Due to large uncertainties in fire emission, transport, and chemical transformation, it remains challenging to accurately predict air quality during wildfire events, hindering our collective capability to issue effective early warnings to protect public health and welfare. Here, we present a new real-time Hazardous Air Quality Ensemble System (HAQES) by leveraging various wildfire smoke forecasts from three U.S. federal agencies (NOAA, NASA, and Navy). Compared to individual models, the HAQES ensemble forecast significantly enhances forecast accuracy. To further enhance forecasting performance, a weighted ensemble forecast approach was introduced and tested. Compared to the unweighted ensemble mean, the multilinear regression weighted ensemble reduced fractional bias by 34% in the major fire regions, false alarm rate by 72%, and increased hit rate by 17%. Finally, we improved the weighted ensemble using quantile regression and weighted regression methods to enhance the forecast of extreme air quality events. The advanced weighted ensemble increased the PM2.5 exceedance hit rate by 55% compared to the ensemble mean. Our findings provide insights into the development of advanced ensemble forecast methods for wildfire air quality, offering a practical way to enhance decision-making support to protect public health.

Article / Publication Data
Active/Online
YES
Available Metadata
DOI ↗
Early Online Release
June 12, 2024
Fiscal Year
NOAA IR URL ↗
Peer Reviewed
YES
Publication Name
Bulletin of The American Meteorological Society
Published On
June 01, 2024
Publisher Name
AMS
Print Volume
105
Issue
6
URL ↗

Authors

Authors who have authored or contributed to this publication.

  • Ravan Ahmadov - Not Positioned Gsl
    Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder
    NOAA/Global Systems Laboratory
  • Eric P. James - Not Positioned Gsl
    Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder
    NOAA/Global Systems Laboratory