Friday, September 12, 2014 - Meadow Fire Projections & Overnight Growth

Fire Behavior Specialists on the Meadow Fire complete a number of projections every day to assist decision makers.  The Fire Behavior Analyst (FBAN) focuses on day-to-day projections and firefighter safety, alerting them to impending dangers like the erratic and unpredictable fire behavior arising from a thunderstorm downdraft.  The Long Term Analyst (LTAN) works more in the three- to fourteen-day time frame.  He or she uses actual weather forecasts for the first three days, usually generated by a National Weather Service meteorologist assigned to the incident.  Fire behavior projections beyond that rely on historic meteorological records for the same time period, pulled from nearby remote automated weather stations (RAWS).

Shown below is a three-day Near-Term Fire Behavior projection based on the 9/10 IR perimeter of the Meadow Fire:

This projection does not take into account any suppression actions. With twelve 20-person crews spiked out in Yosemite's backcountry, they are now making significant gains in containment goals, so a projection of this type will tend to overstate fire growth. While this projection calls for several hundred acres of growth daily, Actual fire growth yesterday was 69 acres, and last night's IR map is shown below:

And here is the summary of air quality data from nearby monitoring stations from this morning:

For the full data set from this morning go to this link.