Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Weather Report

Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM

By James Careless

Up-to-date weather information can do more than tell chiefs how their personnel should dress for the next few days. When used to its fullest, weather data can be a vital source of intelligence in the battle against fire and hazmat situations.

Before trouble happens, weather information can help departments assess the level of risk governed by wind speed and direction, humidity and temperature. When fire breaks out or a hazmat spill occurs, environmental data can indicate not just how the incident may develop and spread, but also where to deploy firefighting teams and what areas to evacuate. It also can aid departments in assessing what level of food, water and heating and cooling protection might be needed for officers at the incident scene. In short, properly analyzed weather information can be strategically and tactically useful to fire chiefs.

“Weather plays a very significant role in fire occurrence, intensity and size,” says Doug Forrest, division chief and fire weather program manager for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “Knowing what the weather is doing and likely to do is of tremendous importance for fire departments, whether rural or urban.”

To be useful to fire officers, weather data has to tell them what is going on in their jurisdictions. It also has to include elements not normally covered on the nightly news. Some of those items, as the recent rash of wildland and interface fires have shown, are lightning strikes and the state of the “fuelstick” on forest floors.

A free, highly useful source of weather data is the ROMAN Web site, http://raws.wrh.noaa.gov/roman. Short for Real-time Observation Monitor and Analysis Network, ROMAN provides detailed weather data from the National Weather Service and the nearly 2,200 remote automated weather stations operating across the United States. ROMAN allows users to search for information by geographic coordinating area, NWS county warning area, state and NWS fire weather zone. Users can check current weather conditions, look over the past five days or check out the predicted 24-hour weather trend.

“ROMAN is an extremely powerful tool available to anyone with access to the Web,” says Chuck Maxwell, meteorologist and predictive services group leader for the Southwest Coordination Area. The SWCA falls under the federal National Interagency Coordination Center, which provides all levels of government with real-time incident information. “Thanks to our RAWS network, we receive near real-time temperature, wind, rainfall, humidity and fuelstick data from solar-powered unmanned weather stations,” he says. “This allows us not just to pass this data onto first responders, but to accurately operate the National Fire Danger Rating System on an ongoing basis.”

Forest Technology Systems manufactures the kind of RAWS stations used by the North American wildland fire community. Physically, they resemble the unmanned Surveyor landers that explored the moon in the mid 1960s. Functionally, these three-legged RAWS stations can be set up for unattended operation. They come with weather-monitoring equipment, onboard computing capacity, and satellite and radio transmitters and antennas. “Our RAWS equipment can even be configured to report weather conditions verbally so that they can be accessed by authorized radio users,” says Chris Lindsay, FTS's business development manager.

FTS stations offer users a variety of communications options that can be customized to a specific application. Many of the sites use satellite uplinks to bring data to the ground where it then is posted to the Internet. This ensures that emergency responders can get critical site-specific weather data through a common Internet connection regardless of where they are in relation to where the weather station is deployed.

FTS also makes Quick-Deploy portable weather stations that can be carried by hand in two bags. “[They] are used in applications where current weather data is needed from a fire scene or hazardous material application,” Lindsay says. “They allow front-line responders to understand how current weather is affecting fire behavior or smoke plume direction. The systems are designed to be installed by an non-technical user within 10 minutes of arrival at a response scene.”

Columbia Weather Systems also makes RAWS equipment, plus portable weather stations that can be vehicle-mounted or carried into place. “Our weather stations are used by fire departments in their hazmat vehicles and mobile command and control centers,” says CWS President Nader Khoury. “All of our equipment is compatible with CAMEO/ALOHA plume modeling software, and you can connect our systems to the Internet so that authorized personnel can see the information anywhere.”

For fire chiefs who want their weather data prepackaged and ready to use, DTN/Meteorlogix is worth checking into. “For our subscribing fire clients, we provide a host of weather information using MxVision Weather-Sentry Public Safety Edition,” says Don Leick, director of product management. “For instance, we can detect potential tornadoes and project their possible paths before they happen, allowing you to have your rescue teams properly prepped and ready to go. Meanwhile, Public Safety Edition's QuickPlume tool will give you a plume model within seconds, allowing for faster evacuations and safer approaches to fire and hazmat scenes. We also track lightning strikes and road conditions in real time. When you need to get to a scene fast during a winter storm, it is good to know what shape the roads are in and how your people should drive to cope with them.”

“We been subscribing to DTN/Meteorlogix since before I got here, and we have found its data to be very helpful in preparing for future events,” says Chief Mike Winters of the Cheney (Wash.) Fire Department. “Last winter we had a pretty severe snow storm, and [the] information helped us make sure we had enough staff and equipment on hand; we knew what was coming at us.”

For departments large or small, weather information is an extremely useful tool. On a strategic level, it can aid fire chiefs in identifying potential fire risk areas, positioning people and resources to deal with any incidents that do occur, and staying ahead of flames and fumes as they progress based on fuel and weather conditions. On a tactical level, weather data can support well-informed decisions in times of crisis, when personnel and the public need to be moved out of harm's way fast.

James Careless is a freelance journalist who regularly covers public safety issues, including communications. His credits include Law and Order, Government Video, and Fire Fighting in Canada magazines.

Data by Meteor

In British Columbia, the Ministry of Forests and Range,which handles wildfires, uses meteor burst transmissions to get data from about 25% of its RAWS back to its provincial and regional fire centers.

“It may not be common knowledge, but there are meteors passing through the upper atmosphere all the time,” says Eric Meyer, superintendent for the Ministry's Fire Weather Program. “By transmitting data from our RAWS in a very wide 60° beam, we can bounce signals off the meteors, allowing us to send radio signals over the horizon without using satellites. It is a very cost-effective way to move data from remote sites to headquarters. In those cases where the meteor's trail is too short, the signal transmission stops and restarts until the complete message gets through.”