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Smoke Managers Subcommittee Meeting November 2017

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Smoke Managers Subcommittee Meeting November 2017 NWCG Smoke Managers Subcommittee Conference Call November 7, 2017 • Intros On call: Mike Broughton, Chair – NWCG Smoke Managers Subcommittee; Smoke Management Coordinator, Rocky Mountain Region USFS; Manager – USFS Smoke Monitor Cache (National) Ursula Parker – NWCG Smoke Managers Subcommittee Secretary AQ Specialist, Butte County APCD Rick Gillam/Mike Moeller, US EPA Mark Melvin, Jones Research Center, SE Georgia Lisa Bye, BLM New Mexico Ben Way & Ryan Beavers, State of WY Air Quality Kathleen Navarro, USFS – Region 5 Greg Johnson, NRCS Air Quality Team, Portland Dar Mims, California ARB Nick Yonkers, Oregon Dept Forestry Dave Mueller, BLM Boise ID Carol Baldwin, Kansas State Univ Doug Whisenhunt, Nebraska NRCS Mike Muller, EPA Region 4 Filling in for Rick Gillam Mike Smith, City of Boulder, Fire Mgr Jennifer Malinski, Red Lake Band Air Quality Specialist Colleen Campbell, AQ Specialist Colorado AQ Andrea Holland, Upper Colorado Interagency Fire Management Unit Debra Harris, North Coast Air Unified AQMD Didier Davignon, Chief, Air Quality Modeling Applications Section, Montreal, Canada • Call for Subcommittee Officers The group needs a Vice Chair to assist in scheduling and running meetings – please let Mike know via email. • EPA update – Rick Gillam Started process for compiling 2017 emission inventory, a triennial effort; 2014 was last one. March – June requests for fire activity data, calculating emissions using SmartFire tool. Work with State AQ folks to get best info submitted. Regional haze, January 2017 final revisions were submitted. EPA went out with add’l guidance and modeling, targeting release for early 2018. National Parks/Class I areas. EER – not a lot new, rule revisions Oct 2016, guidance about WF events influencing ozone concentrations. No one in the east has used that, but in the west, it may be more of an issue, esp ozone EE. There is a companion guidance being developed related to Rx fires and how ozone affects EE. o Speaks to the technical aspects of WF emissions, precursors and how that’s different from WF, focuses on that because it is a more complicated component. o PM2.5 is less targeted but can be an issue. It’s helpful if there is a speciated monitor, that would help the submission. SE regional planning Rx fire workgroup had a workshop in N Carolina a couple of weeks ago to update the comprehensive WF strategy that the group has been using. One strategy is to minimize smoke impacts to public. Strategies were ranked from most to least impact. In the east, that wasn’t ranked as high, so much outreach has been done, folks were more interested in resources, capacity to do Rx fire, other issues. Mark Melvin brought up the SE Rx fire workgroup (southern fire exchange), they’ve had it active for about 5 years. Accomplishments= progress in regional coordination among states within state. They are hosting a webinar Dec 13(?) 10-11:30 am. The webinar will be designed for the SE but might be good for people from outside region to learn about Rx fires. Info about the webinar can be distributed to folks through here. Alan Long, a retired UF professor is the coordinator for Southern Fire Exchange and he’ll be presenting, so it will be special. • Geographical summary of Smoke Fire Season – SE/NE/Mid-West and Plains/SW/West Canada/BC: British Columbia has been burning from early July until late August, worst season for that province. Information was coordinated with US partners. Mike commented about the exchange of smoke from NW US to Canada and vice-versa, asked about communication. Coordinators at the province level elevates to national level – there was collaboration among the provinces. Mike asked for more information about that to be shared on the next call; we’ve been working on an international sharing program to allow ARAs to coordinate smoke messaging. Mike said we had 35 separate geographic assignments for ARAs. Most of them were multiple deployments (several on one fire). Last year at this time, Georgia, TN, Carolinas, took off on their fires, in April-May, Florida and then Georgia took off. Andrea was on Cowbell Fire in Southern Florida. Challenges with that one was smoke on the highway/road (Alligator highway?) and also trying to get power for the monitor was a challenge. Solar panels are available for some of the national cache of air monitors, but issue is security – theft can be an issue. Andrea agreed highway was a big challenge and trying to understand components to forecast Superfog events, but it was too dry for that to be an issue during that event. Andrea offered that the guidelines for that need some refining. Working with Highway Patrol/communication issues were also a challenge. Then June-early July, shift from SE to SW: New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, multiple ARAs were sent to those locations. Mike was running the national cache and was trying to deploy them efficiently/properly. In July, a # of different fires in CA and WY, Andrew was on Schaeffer fires (CA), Josh Hall - Whittier Fire (Santa Barbara) and there were a couple of ARA people on fires in WY. In August, MT, N. Cal, Oregon… Aug and Sept were some of the most widespread smoke impacts in Mike’s memory. We had in MT, Lake McDonald’s monitor, saw PM2.5 hourly levels of >1,000 ug/m3 for over ?36? hours before the monitor gave up. Over 4200 ug/m3 shortly before monitor quit working. Avg 2600 ug/m3 for a 24-hour period before monitor quit working. W Oregon and W MT monitors, components from W. OR might have resulted in failures in the monitors (8 went down due to air flow sensors malfunctioning). Even techs at Met One (Grants Pass) had one malfunction. Nick Yonker commented that in Oregon, couldn’t even think about WA and ID and N. CA, said that fires were concentrated in Cascades and Siskiyou in wilderness/roadless areas. 700,000 acres of burning/WF in state, mainly in western 3rd of state, impacting populated areas such as Medford, Grants Pass, Willamette Valley, # of days in communities w/USG 2017, by far, over double over any other previous year = 200 days when you compute all the communities impacted. 2002 and 2015 were big fire years, but because of the location of the fires, west instead of the east side, East wind carried smoke into populated areas, Sisters got incredibly high readings during Pole Creek fire 2012 but then again this year. Rogue valley was impacted most of Aug with middle Sept with little clearing out. In Willamette Valley, they had some breaks with winds clearing out, but not in Rogue Valley. Nick agreed that this was one of the smokiest seasons he has experienced. Mike reminded everyone that ARAs can help get information about what public can do to protect themselves/plan/prepare during WF events. In October, N. Cal /Napa had their horrendous fires, ARAs were tapped out and agencies needed them to return to their regular duties. Mike ended up not getting sent to Napa because it was not on Federal Land; CAL Fire had jurisdiction and CAL Fire STILL doesn’t see the value of an ARA on the fire, falling back on the fact that “there are fires and there will be smoke.” Mike heard that this may change this year; the state may open up funding to provide resources to help with smoke communication. Asked Dar for info. Dar offered that CA needs to have a more integrated operation, work with ARAs, spotlight on loss of lives. Ursula mentioned the Little Hoover Commission, funding availability to assist with Rx burn opportunities, smoke communication. • Rx Burn Smoke impacts to very small communities It’s impossible to conduct a Rx burn without impacting someone, somewhere. Rx burns are designed so that they don’t smoke out large populated areas. But if we don’t impact a large community, we are going to impact small communities. These small communities often bear the brunt of the impacts. It’s the LMs role to reduce fuels for the health of the forest and to help avoid a catastrophic WF. AQ agencies are charged with minimizing smoke impacts. But smoke impacts cannot be eliminated. Hands are often tied because they cannot approve the burn if negative impacts are anticipated, even to small communities. We have to search for balance. Mike’s thought in the past, just do small burns => less smoke impacts. In practice, you realize that small burns have minimal smoke impacts but aren’t very efficient; costs more per acre to do a small burn, and it doesn’t have nearly the equivalent positive impacts to the landscape. Mike asked how people feel about resolving smoke impacts to small communities if we are avoiding the larger cities. Carol Baldwin (KS) agrees that she concluded that there has to be some give on both sides to make this work. There is a tacit agreement that someone will get impacted, there has to be some give. You cannot manage an ecosystem properly without fire. Stephen Pyne comes back to that we are people with fire, we need fire on the landscape. Carol’s looking forward to the EE guidance that’s coming out. Carol would like more research on the science of getting greater dispersion heights. Nick Yonker added that it is true that we live in a fire environment, you cannot get away from a climate that’s hot and dry in the summer and lightning strikes in the summer start fire. Native Americans used fire, we used Smokey Bear to promote fire suppression. If you live in an area such as that, you have to make adjustments to your life to live with the smoke.
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