The FireWork air quality forecast system with near-real-time biomass burning emissions: Recent developments and evaluation of performance for the 2015 North American wildfire season

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s FireWork air quality (AQ) forecast system for North America with near-real-time biomass burning emissions has been running experimentally during the Canadian wildfire season since 2013. The system runs twice per day with model initializations at 00 UTC and 12 UTC, and produces numerical AQ forecast guidance with 48-hr lead time. In this work we describe the FireWork system, which incorporates near-real-time biomass burning emissions based on the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (CWFIS) as an input to the operational Regional Air Quality Deterministic Prediction System (RAQDPS). To demonstrate the capability of the system we analyzed two forecast periods in 2015 (June 2–July 15, and August 15–31) when fire activity was high, and observed fire-smoke-impacted areas in western Canada and the western United States. Modeled PM(2.5) surface concentrations were compared with surface measurements and benchmarked with results from the operational RAQDPS, which did not consider near-real-time biomass burning emissions. Model performance statistics showed that FireWork outperformed RAQDPS with improvements in forecast hourly PM(2.5) across the region; the results were especially significant for stations near the path of fire plume trajectories. Although the hourly PM(2.5) concentrations predicted by FireWork still displayed bias for areas with active fires for these two periods (mean bias [MB] of –7.3 µg m(−3) and 3.1 µg m(−3)), it showed better forecast skill than the RAQDPS (MB of –11.7 µg m(−3) and –5.8 µg m(−3)) and demonstrated a greater ability to capture temporal variability of episodic PM(2.5) events (correlation coefficient values of 0.50 and 0.69 for FireWork compared to 0.03 and 0.11 for RAQDPS). A categorical forecast comparison based on an hourly PM(2.5) threshold of 30 µg m(−3) also showed improved scores for probability of detection (POD), critical success index (CSI), and false alarm rate (FAR). Implications: Smoke from wildfires can have a large impact on regional air quality (AQ) and can expose populations to elevated pollution levels. Environment and Climate Change Canada has been producing operational air quality forecasts for all of Canada since 2009 and is now working to include near-real-time wildfire emissions (NRTWE) in its operational AQ forecasting system. An experimental forecast system named FireWork, which includes NRTWE, has been undergoing testing and evaluation since 2013. A performance analysis of FireWork forecasts for the 2015 wildfire season shows that FireWork provides significant improvements to surface PM(2.5) forecasts and valuable guidance to regional forecasters and first responders.