The following proposal to funding opportunity NOAA-OAR-WPO-2024-2008082, through the weather program office (WPO), is designed to address the following project objective: fire weather including…

The following proposal to funding opportunity NOAA-OAR-WPO-2024-2008082, through the weather program office (WPO), is designed to address the following project objective: fire weather including elements of program priorities FW-2: SMOKE transport, evolution, and interaction with meteorology ; FW-3: data assimilation of atmospheric and terrestrial conditions needed for all stages of fire weather forecasts, and finally FW-5: fire weather forecast system testing, verification, and predictability. This solicitation directly requests projects that may focus on the warn-on-forecast system to model fire-weather for shortterm forecasts. We address this focus by proposing extensive development and validation of the recently created warn-on-forecast system for SMOKE (WOFS-SMOKE). The baseline WOFS has proven very successful in generating short term (0-6 hour) forecasts of high impact weather events such as tornadoes, hail, severe winds, and flash flooding. The system assimilates conventional, radar, and satellite data within a given domain using an ensemble kalman filter (ENKF) technique at 15 minute intervals to continually update the model analysis in a rapidly evolving environment. Forecasts of wildfire SMOKE can be vital to local emergency managers to determine how best to fight a fire and when/where evacuations might be needed. Furthermore, SMOKE from wildfires impact the surrounding atmosphere in many ways affecting air-quality, thermodynamic, and cloud properties. The complex nature of these and other impacts makes their forecasting difficult. Fortunately, both wildfire and SMOKE aerosol characteristics are measured from GOES16/17/18 geostationary satellites at high temporal and spatial resolutions and these data are ideal for use in a WOFS-like system. The prototype version of WOFS-SMOKE was tested on several wildfire events between 2020 and 2023 and generated forecasts with a realistic representation of wildfire SMOKE when compared against satellite observations. However, there remains much work that needs to be accomplished to fully optimize the use of observed fire and SMOKE characteristics. This work includes utilizing wildfire trend information, assimilating aerosol optical depth retrievals into the system, additional coupling of the retrieved wildfire properties to the environment, exploring the potential advantages of a finer grid-spacing system and finally testing in an operational environment. To evaluate these improvements, we propose that WOFS-SMOKE forecasts be included as part of the fire weather testbed (FWT) in boulder, CO. User feedback will be vital in determining future directions of the system and where to allocate resources to best achieve the most desired advancements. Wofssmoke is in alignment with the priorities and mission scope of the FWT, and they are open to an evaluation in the testbed as scheduling permits.