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The National Centers for Environmental Prediction have begun providing Fire Weather output from selected areas of the North American Mesoscale (NAM) model via Unidata's CONDUIT feed. The additional data were added into the CONDUIT feed on September 20, 2011.
Fire Weather Incident meteorologist Support (FWIS) model runs are high resolution innermost "nests" of NCEP's parallel NAM12 model. (Nests are relatively small geographic areas inside the model run area that are selected for higher-resolution modelling.) Nests located in the CONUS have a 1.33 km horizontal spacing and use a 375x375x60 grid. Nests located in Alaska have a 1.5 km horizontal spacing and use a 333x333x60 grid. The fire weather forecasts extend out for 36 hours. Additional details about the NAM-FWIS data are available in this letter from Geoff DiMego of NCEP's mesoscale modeling branch. (Note: the PowerPoint slide presentation linked from Geoff DiMego's letter is quite large (25 Mbytes) and goes into detail about the new NAM model.)
Examples of the fire weather nests located to follow Hurricane Irene's movement up the East Coast can be found at:
- http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/mmb/mmbpll/irene/firewxnest.20110826/
- http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/mmb/mmbpll/irene/firewxnest.20110827/
- http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/mmb/mmbpll/irene/firewxnest.20110828/
Rebecca Cosgrove, who represents the National Weather Service and NCEP on the Unidata Users Committee, noted that the fire weather data are currently experimental products, and "there is always the possibility that a cycle could be cancelled if there are other production issues." Cosgrove expects the fire weather model runs to be fully integrated into the NAM output sometime in October 2011.
As a result of the addition of the fire weather data, the volume of data moved through CONDUIT has increased by an average of 800 Mbytes/hour. As shown in the image at right, NCEP scheduled the insertion of the new data to occur during a time of relatively low data volume. No problems handling the additional data have been reported by IDD top-level relay sites.
For additional information on the fire weather data products or CONDUIT in general, contact support-conduit@unidata.ucar.edu.
