New NOAA Fire Weather Observing Systems in the Wake of Palisades Wildfire
The U.S. Department of Commerce and NOAA have announced that approximately $15 million has been provided through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to construct and deploy a new suite of fire weather observing systems in high-risk locations in the Western United States to support wildfire prediction, detection, and monitoring. This comes in the wake of the devastating Palisades wildfire that began burning in Southern California earlier this month.
The investments support four distinct but related components of a regional fire weather observing system that relies on different technologies and approaches, with the goal of improving wildfire prediction, detection, and monitoring from the regional to local scales.
Existing federal properties with established NOAA presence near Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Desert Rock, Nevada, have been selected for two of the observing sites. NOAA is still finalizing the location of the other two in California and Washington state. The total cost of the project is $7.3 million.
During active fires, observations from state-of-the-art suites of research-quality instruments at these sites will be available to support operational decisions made by emergency managers. They will also improve numerical weather prediction models that are run daily, providing high-resolution forecasts on what might occur in the hours to days ahead.