The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is experimenting with a system that produces forecasts for the distribution of smoke from wildfires.

The examples of their products created at 6 a.m. MDT August 4 for near-surface smoke are included here — predicting conditions for 6 p.m. MDT August 4 (above) and 6 p.m. August 5 (below). Click the images to see larger versions.

Developers are collecting feedback from users to improve the model before it is considered for transfer into operations.

The HRRR-Smoke air quality modeling system simulates the emissions and transport of smoke from wildfires detected by the VIIRS/JPSS satellite fire product in high spatial resolution (3km) over the CONUS domain. Currently the model is run every 6 hours (00, 06, 12 and 18 UTC) to produce smoke forecasts for next 36 hours. The forecast products of near-surface and vertically integrated smoke concentrations are visualized on a GSD web-site in real time: http://rapidrefresh.noaa.gov/HRRRsmoke/