Evaluation of Smoke Modeling Tools Used for Estimating Air Quality Impacts from Prescribed Burning

Abstract:

Prescribed burning is an important land management practice used for fuel management and ecological purposes across the U.S. While this technique is beneficial in many ways, smoke management is often perceived as a barrier to its use. Several modeling tools are available for land managers to predict smoke transport from a prescribed burn. These vary in complexity, data requirements, and ease of use, impacting the smoke plume predictions and likelihood of adoption by users. However, there are few systematic comparisons and analyses of these tools. In this work, we evaluate smoke modeling tools commonly used to estimate the potential smoke impacts of prescribed fire projects. Using burn data from a year of prescribed burning activity in North Carolina State Parks, we model and compare smoke plumes generated with the Simple Smoke Screening Tool, VSmoke-Web, and HYSPLIT, as well as the chemical transport model CMAQ. Model output is compared using spatial plume overlap, population experiencing smoke, and predicted PM_2.5 concentrations. The tools are further evaluated considering ease of use for land managers when planning prescribed burns. We find large discrepancies in populations experiencing smoke as estimated by the different tools. The comparison of smoke transport predictions based on past operational burning activity provides insights into potential air quality impacts in areas subjected to frequent burning and highlights research needs to improve the tools for use in operational prescribed fire planning.