Wildfire Model Validation

During my M.S. at UC Berkeley in 2018-2019, the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, CA resulted in a pall of smoke that lingered over the Bay Area for almost 2 weeks. As someone from the East Coast, I was astonished by the scale and impact of the smoke. We wore N95 masks for the majority of the event (an unusual accessory prior to the pandemic), and tried to avoid exerting ourselves outdoors.

After the Camp Fire, I helped work on a scientific publication that investigated the added value of using low cost air quality sensors (specifically PurpleAir) to validate the NOAA HRRR-Smoke model. This model is a coupling of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) with a smoke plume model that uses satellite observations of fire radiative power to estimate the smoke output.

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