Fire Tools

Resources for monitoring fire and smoke activity

1. New fires are typically seen first on the GOES-16 (East; 75.2W) Satellite Imagery Slider from the Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch (RAMMB) / Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University.
2. For the first official stats on a new fire (size, suppression or not), click on the appropriate region on the U.S. map from Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACC), then find the fires on a prominently displayed zoomable map. (National Fire Situational Awareness (NFSA) tends to give similar info all on one national, zoomable, topo map which is nice, but GACC will have contact phone numbers to call about the possibility of sampling.)
3. After a few days when a fire and it's management are well established, InciWeb often describes it in pretty good detail (except some California fires managed by Calfire).
4. Idaho Smoke Information serves current ground-based smoke impacts on a national map.
5. Great Basin Coordination Center Outlooks serves fire outlooks for the Boise area.

Resources for forecast and modeling

• NOAA ESRL Global Systems Division High-Resolution Rapid Refresh-Smoke (HRRR-Smoke) model
• NOAA Air Resources Laboratory HYSPLIT model
• NCAR Atmospheric Chemistry Observations and Modeling (ACOM) Products in Support of FIREX-AQ