Profiles of Operational and Research Forecasting of Smoke and Air Quality Around the World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biomass burning has shaped many of the ecosystems of the planet and for millennia humans have used it as a tool to manage the environment. When widespread fires occur, the health and daily lives of millions of people can be affected by the smoke, often at unhealthy to hazardous levels leading to a range of short-term and long-term health consequences such as respiratory issues, cardiovascular issues, and mortality. It is critical to adequately represent and include smoke and its consequences in atmospheric modeling systems to meet needs such as addressing the global climate carbon budget and informing and protecting the public during smoke episodes. Many scientific and technical challenges are associated with modeling the complex phenomenon of smoke. Variability in fire emissions estimates has an order of magnitude level of uncertainty, depending upon vegetation type, natural fuel heterogeneity, and fuel combustion processes. Quantifying fire emissions also vary from ground/vegetation-based methods to those based on remotely sensed fire radiative power data. These emission estimates are input into dispersion and air quality modeling systems, where their vertical allocation associated with plume rise, and temporal release parameterizations influence transport patterns, and, in turn affect chemical transformation and interaction with other sources. These processes lend another order of magnitude of variability to the downwind estimates of trace gases and aerosol concentrations. This chapter profiles many of the global and regional smoke prediction systems currently operational or quasi-operational in real time or near-real time. It is not an exhaustive list of systems, but rather is a profile of many of the systems in use to give examples of the creativity and complexity needed to simulate the phenomenon of smoke. This chapter, and the systems described, reflect the needs of different agencies and regions, where the various systems are tailored to the best available science to address challenges of a region. Smoke forecasting requirements range from warning and informing the public about potential smoke impacts to planning burn activities for hazard reduction or resource benefit. Different agencies also have different mandates, and the lines blur between the missions of quasi-operational organizations (e.g. research institutions) and agencies with operational mandates. The global smoke prediction systems are advanced, and many are self-organizing into a powerful ensemble, as discussed in section 2. Regional and national systems are being developed independently and are discussed in sections 3-5 for Europe (11 systems), North America (7 systems), and Australia (3 systems). Finally, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) effort (section 6) is bringing together global and regional systems and building the Vegetation Fire and Smoke Pollution Advisory and Assessment Systems (VFSP-WAS) to support countries with smoke issues and who lack resources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".