Abstract
In past decades the Forest Service and other land management agencies in the United States developed the image in the national popular imagination of forest fires being unnatural occurrences fraught with danger and personal loss. These policies, which were designed to save forests from fire, especially commercially valued forests and associated private property, have now left many ecosystems with fuel loadings that can easily result in large conflagrations unless these loadings are carefully and methodically removed by controlled burns.
New air pollution regulations for fine particulates less than 2.5 gm in diameter and visibility protection potentially conflict with our growing understanding of the ecological benefits of fires in many forest ecosystems. Seeking a new balance between air quality regulatory programs and ecosystem stewardship, state air agencies and federal land managers are grasping for a new paradigm incorporating improved processes for permitting open burns, higher technology approaches to assess fuel loading more accurately, improved use of fire weather information, the development of improved fire emission factors, new methods for cooperative fire planning, and the implementation of improved dispersion models to understand the implications of biomass burning emissions to regulatory programs.
This paper reviews models that are currently being used in smoke management in the United States. These modes run the gamut from simple, straight-line Gaussian dispersion models to sophisticated regional meteorological forecasting tools (e.g., MM5 and CSU RAMS) coupled with sophisticated puff dispersion models (e.g., Calpuff). Based upon an assessment of appropriate applications for this spectrum of tools including their operational data requirements, we present a strategy for implementing a proposed operational smoke management system. This system will be designed for field personnel of the Forest Service and other land management agencies, for both planning and bum project management.
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References
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© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Fox, D.G., Riebau, A.R., Fisher, R.W. (2000). Managing Smoke in United States Wildlands and Forests: A Challenge for Science and Regulations. In: Innes, J.L., Beniston, M., Verstraete, M.M. (eds) Biomass Burning and Its Inter-Relationships with the Climate System. Advances in Global Change Research, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47959-1_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47959-1_17
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