Examining Potential Future Air Quality Impacts from Wildfires with the AQUIPT Planning Tool

Fire and smoke managers are often interested in examining the potential impacts of a planned fire. Sonoma Technology worked collaboratively with the USDA Forest Service's AirFire Team to develop a "climate" version of the BlueSky smoke modeling system called the Air Quality Impacts Planning Tool (AQUIPT). AQUIPT provides a probabilistic smoke impact analysis from user-specified emissions sources. Sonoma Technology prepared and quality-controlled the data needed to run AQUIPT and implemented, tested, and evaluated the tool. A long-term (27-year) meteorological data set was prepared and connected to the BlueSky Framework. The Framework and these data were used to develop a climatology-type analysis of the expected impacts for a fire that might happen during a specific time period. The results from multiple simulations (over ranges of days and years) are aggregated to provide a statistical analysis of potential smoke impacts from planned fires. Sonoma Technology built a web-based interface to AQUIPT that allows outside users to submit analysis requests and review the results online.
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AQUIPT can generate predictions of expected future air quality impacts from fires for specified times of the year based on historical information.