Extreme Heat and Fire Weather Conditions in the West; Heavy Rain in the Southeast; Poor Air Quality

Extreme heat will begin to peak across the Desert Southwest. Multiple days of hot, dry and windy conditions are expected to bring fire weather concerns for portions of the Four Corners region into the central Great Basin and Rockies. Heavy rainfall and a flash flooding threat continues in the Southeast. Poor air quality persists from the Upper Midwest into the Northeast due to wildfire smoke. Read More >

Prior to the seasonal green-up, land management agencies engage in a lot of prescribed burning to help promote a healthy and sometimes safer ecology. The Horicon Marsh area up in northern Dodge county is an active place for prescribed, or controlled burns. One fire on, Thursday, April 23, was generating a large smoke plume that was clearly visible from our tower camera and was picked up by our WSR-88D doppler radar.

Here's the view looking north from the tower camera:

Here's the view from the radar:

We can use this example as a training exercise to run the NOAA HYSPIT model. If this were a hazardous materials release that generated a potentially dangerous plume, the HYSPLIT model could give us a good idea where the plume is headed and what the dispersion concentrations would be. We would be working closely with state and local emergency management to help inform the public of any possible dangers. So, with that in mind, here an animation of the smoke plume using the HYSPLIT model. It looks like a reasonable approximation!

Davis

MKX RSS Feed

Extreme Heat and Fire Weather Conditions in the West; Heavy Rain in the Southeast; Poor Air Quality

Large Smoke Plume From Horicon Marsh Area