Why don’t we have smoke forecasts? carolynkor explores the limitations of science—and bureaucracy—that make predicting smoky skies so hard.
-Smoke’s accuracy during the Camp Fire. Usually, a smoke-forecast model is extremely challenging to validate, since there are often multiple sources of smoke and air pollution at any given moment. But the Camp Fire was the only large wildfire burning at the time in the West, making it a prime case for checking the model’s predictions of where smoke would travel. Chow, and her students, took the project on as an unfunded labor of love.
James and Ahmadov continued debugging, rewriting, and fine-tuning the model’s code, with help from the work of Chow and her students. The summer of 2020 was especially bad. More than half of California’s population experienced unhealthy or hazardous air for a month or more. “So many people were impacted by smoke all over the country, but especially in the western U.S.,” James said. In December, 2020, when the N.W.S.
For forecasts extending multiple days into the future, the uncertainties grow simply because it’s difficult to know what the fire will do. Will it be less active in two days because rain is on the way? Or is the temperature rising, and humidity falling? James and Ahmadov are starting to play with modulating the amount of smoke that their model predicts based on the weather forecast.
The largest challenge is predicting near-surface smoke density. For particulates to severely affect our air quality, they must, of course, be near the surface, in the air we breathe. Even if-Smoke accurately predicts how much carbon a fire is emitting, Sitkowski, from the Weather Channel, told me, “the smoke can move up and down in the atmosphere as it moves downstream from a wildfire.
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