STORMY ISSUES IN FIRE WEATHER

Lightning busts. Wind shifts. Approaching fronts. High-pressure masses that collide with moisture-laden pockets of low pressure. Murmuring fires that are kicked into firestorms by oddball weather phenomena. Who's watching out for you when you're on the fire line, and who do you depend on when you plan your strategy for the next 12 hours?

A note about sources cited in this article: As a general rule, anonymous sources are not used on this site or in the pages of WILDLAND FIREFIGHTER Magazine. Under the circumstances, though, we made an exception with this story. Well over a dozen un-named sources are cited in this article. Their quotes are not exactly anonymous -- the author knows full well who and where these sources are. As much as possible, their information has been checked for accuracy and/or verified with other sources. Because so many of them asked to remain un-named or to have their identities kept confidential, and because they offered good reasons for this, their wishes have been complied with.

Weather forecasts specific to wildland fire have been provided since as early as 1916 when the U.S. Weather Bureau was still a part of the Department of Agriculture. In the last decade, though, the fire weather program has been a repeated target of budget cutters. An agreement between the National Weather Service (NWS) and the federal land management agencies specifies that meteorological support will be provided for fire. The NWS, however, is struggling through a nationwide Modernization and Associated Restructuring (MAR), and the fire community is more than a little worried about a resultant degradation of services.

One of the key pieces of the MAR is the loss of meteorologists who specialize in fire weather. These people are being moved, transferred, re-assigned, or otherwise attritioned out of fire weather. The NWS contends that its core staff of generalists can do a better job than the fire weather specialists did by using new forecast technology. This new-and-improved technology, though, hasn't come online in quite the quality or timeframe that was expected. And the MAR will close the former specialized fire weather offices; fire meteorologists, or "fire mets," will be absorbed into the staffs of the new modernized offices, where they will take on additional forecast duties including aviation meteorology, hydrology, marine forecasting, and severe weather warnings.

The planned transition, though, has been stalling, partly because of problems with the technology, partly because of budget shortfalls, and partly because of objections from the wildland fire community.

The fire agencies see clearly the connection between fire weather and safety, but the NWS hasn't quite got hold of it yet, for several reasons. The agency has not acknowledged the value of or the need for dedicated fire weather specialists who are familiar with local conditions and weather patterns (and their relevance to fire behavior). Nor does the NWS seem to understand the connection between these meteorologists and safety -- the NWS does a dismal job of tracking statistics on fire weather as a cause of injuries, fatalities, and property damage. Private for-profit weather companies lobbied Congress for transferring weather services away from government agencies without knowledge or understanding of the fire weather program previously handled by the NWS, and Congress has slashed funding for the programs. The cumulative effect of these factors has created a potential blowup situation that has fire agencies worried and NWS management scrambling for a solution.

LOSING THE FIRE METS

One of the big lessons from South Canyon was the importance of good fire weather information; there was an incident meteorologist (IMET) on duty at the coordination center in Grand Junction that day, and his forecasts and warnings were right on target -- but the information never got to the people in the field. On many other fires, tragedy was avoided because fire weather specialists and accurate forecasting were available. Ironically, though, as prescribed fire acres increase and the wildland/urban interface fire risk grows, the NWS is planning to reduce the number of dedicated fire weather specialists.

The NWS plans for fire weather specialists on duty or on call during the fire season, but fire managers worry about reduced service quality and expertise when the NWS starts rotating garden-variety meteorologists through the system. The generalist on shift will issue fire weather products (see sidebar), and at some offices, an IMET will respond to wildfire (or other natural disaster) dispatch requests.

Some meteorologists claim that IMETs with no actual fire experience could be dispatched for incidents. "That's false," says Paul Stokols, fire weather program manager at NWS headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. "We won't send anyone out without experience."

The NWS intends that all of its meteorologists will be "experts" in fire weather; they plan to maintain fire weather services by laying some training on the general meteorologists. Some of these newly trained experts will be interns with as little as three years on the job, and the fire training they're getting may be less than adequate. It consists merely of an interactive CD-ROM learning course -- a good introduction to fire weather with eight hours of interactive training material presented by experienced fire weather forecasters -- and an Intermediate Fire Behavior (S-290) course of about 16 hours of correspondence material, half of which is weather. Some of the NWS offices plan to supplement this with on-the-job instruction by former fire weather forecasters.

"The interactive module has been out there about a year," says Stokols. "At every office we have a fire weather focal point to oversee the forecasts going out and how good they are. We don't as yet have a verification program nationwide to keep track of how good they are, but we will a couple years down the line." Stokols contends that the fire weather training package is more than adequate to equip core forecasters with the tools they need to handle fire weather. "It's more than they used to get," he says. "There are some more advanced classes that they have the opportunity to go to. They're going to have all the courses available to them. They've been to satellite and radar classes; they've had all kinds of classes thrown at them."

Stokols adds that about 60 people, representing half of the NWS offices, recently attended a week-long class in Boise. "They're supposed to go back to their offices and pass that information along. Next year we'll plan to pick up the other half of the offices. We went into how to set up a fire program in the offices, and we're focusing on what the users' needs are and how to outreach with the users."

THIS IS NOT A NEW PROBLEM

This is a storm that's been brewing on the horizon for a long time. In 1989 the NWS brought fire folks together to propose a plan for fire weather under MAR. Their recommendations were rejected by the NWS operations director. Then in 1995 the California Wildfire Coordinating Group (CWCG) endorsed a proposal that would place the fire weather centers at the Geographic Area Coordination Centers. This, too, was rejected, and by then the number of FTEs in fire weather had been cut from 51 down to 38 in the NWS plans. By 1996 things had gone from bad to worse -- the MAR plans had cut fire weather FTEs down to about 20.

Fire agency concerns have centered around the loss of experienced fire weather specialists, and the NWS is aware of the concerns of the fire agencies. "We've been having kind of a tough time this year with the user community," says Stokols. "We've put together a team to look at the concerns of the NWCG and to look at where we're going with the fire weather program." The team includes representatives from the interagency coordination centers and from federal and state fire agencies, and Stokols says the NWS will rely heavily on the recommendations of this team. "We're not pulling out of the fire program. We're going to maintain IMETs and have them available -- that's not going to change. We'll also be looking at the criteria on when we go from a dedicated person to the core staff."

Though the NWS figures that upgrades in technology will make their core forecasters as good as or better than the fire specialists, the fire agencies have not yet been willing to swallow that. The CWCG evaluated fire weather needs in California and concluded that the NWS could not meet those needs, even with the new advances in technology. The CWCG then struck a deal with the NWS for fire weather units at the two coordination centers in California. Several NWS fire mets were hired on at the coordination centers in Redding and Riverside. This agreement was renewed the last week of April.

Meteorologist Chris Fontana has been working fire weather since 1974; he's team leader at the Redding Interagency Fire Weather & Warning Unit. "The agreement recognizes that fire weather in the West is severe. The California fire agencies said they'd hire some of the meteorologists; the agreement has worked well to hire them on; it's been successful."

California's not the only place where the NWS has had a tough time with its user community; Ron Coats, unit leader for Fire & Aviation Management with the USFS Region 8 in Atlanta, Georgia, points out that this is not just a Western issue. "We work pretty closely with the Weather Service in the South, and we're concerned with the lack of services. We are having problems getting local IMETs because they're not available; we're getting meteorologists now from outside the region. Not that they're bad, but when you have one who's been forecasting weather and worked with the teams in the past, and they know the region, that works better than someone who's coming in fresh."

WORTH THEIR WEIGHT IN MERCURY?

Coats remembers a nasty fire in the south Florida Everglades in 1989 when an IMET familiar with local conditions kept crews out of what could have been a dangerous situation. "The fire was well over 90,000 acres, and we had a wind forecast come in from him about the seabreeze influence. He pointed out the size of the fire and the influences of the seabreeze from the Atlantic, and then explained that the fire was also going to be influenced by the Gulf." It was logical to assume that the afternoon winds off the Atlantic would push the fire to the west. The IMET, however, pointed out that the warmer air over the Gulf was going to create an even stronger seabreeze and overpower the influence of the Atlantic seabreeze on the other side of the fire. "It hit me like a bucket of water," says Coats. "He knew, because he was familiar with the area, what time the seabreeze would take effect and what was going to happen. He really made us stand back and think about it, and we got hold of the crews out on the line and told them what we were looking at. It was a real screwy deal -- you'd fly down one side of the fire, and the wind was blowing one way, and when you flew down the other side, the wind was blowing the other way. No one was hurt, but we credit that to having a local IMET who was familiar with the local conditions. Without his input we could have been in a world of hurt."

Familiarity with local conditions and weather patterns is critical, not just for raging project fires, but also for prescribed burning. Two factors that limit prescribed fire use are the risk of escape onto high-value land and smoke intrusions into sensitive airsheds. Both of these can be mitigated by accurate weather forecasts. "The meteorologists in this region are one of our biggest assets," says Coats. "That's tied to our day-to-day operations with initial attack and to prescribed fire. We burn probably 60 to 70 percent of the nation's total prescribed fire acres, and here is where we really need the individual who understands fire weather and fire behavior on a day-to-day basis. We burn every month out of the year -- that's a critical situation, and the Weather Service is not giving fire weather services to the states at the level that they once did. With fire, we're dealing with a situation where if we mess up then someone could die."

The Pacific Northwest Wildfire Coordinating Group (PNWCG) is also concerned about the ability of the NWS to meet its fire weather needs. A study they did reached the same conclusions as the one in California; after it was published, the NWS promised to maintain some fire weather forecasters during the 1998 fire season. In April, additional fire weather positions included in an "FTE bulge" were announced in a memo from Carl Gorski, fire weather program leader at the NWS western region headquarters in Salt Lake City. The extra positions, Gorski said, were intended to "mitigate any shortfalls in our modernized fire weather operations prior to end-state staffing in our field offices." He announced 24 approved positions to supplement staffing; these positions are not dedicated fire weather positions, and offices without bulge staffing will not be required to supply IMETS for incident response.

"We've done eight zillion different staffing exercises in the last few years," says Gorski. "We're going to be using this transition staffing to help out our offices during the transition. We will have a dedicated fire weather program manager in each of the 24 offices in the Western states, and we still have all of the old fire weather guys in 15 offices. We are running the programs the way we have in the past, except we've moved Wenatchee to Spokane lock, stock, and barrel. The extra staffing is open-ended; it's tied to our ability to prove to the customers that the fire weather program indeed meets their requirements."

Gorski also noted that that proof is tied to a fully capable AWIPS system, which is currently not funded.

"What the bulge staffing recognizes is that we're not ready to go to our end-state staffing," explains Stokols. "Right now in the Western region there are 15 offices with a dedicated fire weather person, and some of them have IMETs in addition to that. They've moved some people around and I don't have those numbers, but we're going to have fire weather programs in pretty much every office in the country. We just went through this reshuffling in the last few months, and I haven't seen the final figures on where everybody is, but we have the people to send out. We also have a policy that if the office closest to the fire doesn't have someone available, we'll send the next closest office."

SHUFFLE THOSE NUMBERS, BABY

This shuffling of funding and staffing is referred to by some fire agency folks as a game of "Hide the Fire Mets." Back in 1994 NWS staffing plans included some 35 FTEs for fire weather. The new so-called bulge staffing includes funding for 37 additional fire weather positions, but they are not dedicated positions. The NWS claims about maintaining adequate services in fire weather run a little thin when they request and receive funding for fire weather specialists and then shuffle the people and funding into positions for generalist forecasters with a bit of fire training. The NWS mission charges the agency with the protection of life and property; in the West the two main protection areas are wildland fire and floods. There's not a lot of mitigation you can do in advance of floods, but wildland fire risks can be dramatically reduced and controlled, and fire weather is a key piece of that. The NWS staffing plans for the West include 60 positions in hydrology, and two for fire weather.

"I can't answer that," says Stokols, "but two for fire weather is incorrect. The OMB (Office of Management & Budget) and our staffing people are bean counters and tend to look at just the numbers. They see the fire weather season as just six months, so that's the way the calculations were made."

Though the NWS main transition activities plan shows that the 1997 number -- 30 positions in fire weather -- will drop to 12 by 1999 and two by the year 2000, Gorski says those figures are outdated. "Those numbers are predicated on the transition activities planned back in 1994 or 92 or something like that. That's why we now have some bulge staffing. Some of those positions will be news hires, but we don't just take some person off the street and he becomes a meteorologist. Interns don't get to bid on a meteorologist job till they're trained and certified. They don't have any special certification process for fire weather, but we go through a process where they do training. During this transition period we would have at least the 24 transition positions, and at least 24 in the year 2000. There'd be 37 nationwide for both years, not including all the old fire weather guys that have moved on -- we still have them."

EXPERTS vs. GARDEN-VARIETY METS

No one in the fire agencies is questioning the number of offices or core forecasters maintained by the NWS -- it's the point about dedicated staff and the experienced fire mets that seems to fall on deaf ears with the NWS.

But really, how important are experienced fire weather meteorologists? "Absolutely essential," says Gerry Day, who heads up the Geographic Area Coordination Center in Portland, Oregon. "One of our chief concerns since the earliest discussions of the core forecaster concept has been the expected loss over time of expertise in fire weather meteorology. Many of the experienced fire wether mets are still in the agency, and there is still real strength and depth of expertise in some weather service offices such as Medford, which has two qualified fire weather meteorologists and several former fire weather mets who hold other positions. Contrast that with an office like Pendleton, which serves an area that commonly experiences both severe fire weather and a large incidence of extreme wildland fire behavior. Now add in a significant increase in prescribed fire activity, and one can understand our concern when the office lacks the depth of expertise when compared to an office like Medford. The fact is, the future looks more like the Pendleton situation than Medford."

"We're getting everybody involved in fire weather," says Stokols. "We're spreading the knowledge and expertise out. I'll admit there were some really super fire forecasters in the past, and there may be a few that we've lost and some of them weren't replaced. But Gerry's getting hung up on the fact that the only person who can do a fire weather forecast is one who has done them before. That's not true. We can train people to do it. He may have been lucky in dealing with one of the better ones, but we're trying to equalize it and make them all good."

But Day explains that dedicated fire mets offer not only site-specific expertise but also familiarity with the business requirements and the subtleties of fire behavior. "They understand that minor fluctuations in wind speed and relative humidity are crucial to accurately predicting fire behavior. What may be insignificant variations to some meteorologists are details that can make a huge difference in actual fire behavior. That's one value-added component you get with a dedicated fire weather specialist. The small things and the subtleties make fire weather forecasting as much an art as it is a science."

Mike Edrington, director of Fire & Aviation for Region 6, says there are many examples of the value of such specialists. "On the most successful incidents we've had, we've had good predictive services, and it was good forecasting and fire weather service that saved our bacon. In 1996, for example, the NWS was out on the big incidents, and we had up to 30 fires going at one time. But we were able to predict each day what was going to happen with the fires, and plan accordingly. With good dedicated fire weather people, you can see the probability of more lightning storms and the likelihood of those fires getting bigger. The NWS has been an integral part of that."

WHAT ARE LIVES WORTH?

There have been a number of instances where experienced fire mets warned of impending severe conditions long before mainstream meteorologists were aware of any problems. The difference between IMETS and core forecasters is perhaps best illustrated by considering two incidents that occurred at about the same time in 1996 -- Coyote Peak and Shepard Mountain. A report from a qualified IMET at Boise prompted fire managers to pull Coyote Peak people off the mountain. On Shepard Mountain, however, the fire weather report came from Billings. The IMET was not on duty, and a core forecaster was providing the report. When the unit requested that the IMET come back on duty for support, the request was denied. Several people on Shepard Mountain survived the burnover that followed.

"When we're planning for future operations and moving people around, it's incidents like that that we keep in mind," says Stokols. "It's our role to ensure that we miss less and less. We're not perfect."

Decisions on the fire line based on accurate weather reports and forecasts are not just a matter of potential injuries to a handful of firefighters, though. "Look at how we use weather," says Alice Forbes, who heads up the Geographic Area Coordination Center in Redding. "We make multi-million-dollar decisions based on what the meteorologist is telling us. You never know what the weather's going to do, but the meteorologists do, and they can enlighten you. Then you can make decisions about whether a fire is going to be a major rager or not."

Forbes says the incident meteorologist reports on the Huffer Fire on the Lassen made the difference between a fire and a disaster. "On that fire, the Weather Service in Sacramento called and said, Your fire is taking off.' We often manage to avert major catastrophe at the incident by having a qualified meteorologist there. You just can't put a dollar value on the benefit of having trained and qualified people there to do the job."

Forbes thinks the experienced meteorologists now on staff will carry the fire community through for at least the short term. "We at least in California are in pretty good shape, at least for this year -- but maybe not in the future. We'll have a total of eight meteorologists in the state, but they won't be dedicated as they were in the past. The Weather Service made a lot of guarantees in this modernization plan. They say we're still getting the service, and that they didn't guarantee the quality of the service. They are saying these forecasters can do the job. Once they show me they can do the job, then I'm willing to cancel our agreement."

She says the NWS doesn't have the ability to give the core forecaster the kind of training and experience that the dedicated IMETs had. "Without it, they can't provide the fire weather forecasts that we need. I don't want to see another South Canyon or another Mann Gulch."

ENTER THE GENERAL

Retired Brigadier General John J. Kelly, Jr., who was consistently unavailable for comment on this article, was appointed NWS director in February 1998. He came to this position with 33 years' experience in weather, most of it with the Air Force. Just before leaving the Air Force, he restructured their weather program, reducing overhead by 52 percent, decentralizing control, and reducing operating costs by 30 percent. Prior to his appointment, General Kelly was a senior advisor on weather services for the Department of Commerce, where he conducted a review of the NWS operation and made his report on the resources required to complete the MAR program. His October 1997 report evaluated agency activities and costs and adjusted both -- the NEXRAD program, for example, was cut by $7 million, and budget shortfalls were expected to cut field staffing at forecast offices by 200 positions in 1999.

Fire agency folks were hopeful in the spring that Kelly would be able to solve this ongoing spitfight with the NWS. The general did assign a task force to the issue, and he requested a plan for solutions. By late summer, though, the biggest change noted by fire management personnel was the further loss of fire met availability -- and Gorski's promotion.

JUGGLING FIRE METS WITH MONEY FROM CONGRESS

The MAR plans have long been plagued with more than just staffing problems; budget and technical problems have also repeatedly cropped up. With what's called the Build 6 stage of MAR, the high-tech forecasting equipment was supposed to come online; it's neither in place nor funded. The AWIPS systems were intended to allow automated forecasting -- instead of writing the forecast, you'd sit and adjust things with the computer and generate the forecast automatically. You didn't have to be an expert -- the computer would do it for you. Problem is, even if it were functional, the fire managers are not sitting still for it.

"It was supposed to allow them to do the general forecast," says Forbes. "And then they push a little button and it's the aviation forecast, and then they push a little button and it's the marine forecast, and then they push a little button and it's the fire forecast. Well, that's not going to serve the needs of my customers, the firefighters."

One of the fire mets explains, "The NWS has always defined MAR in stages. The last stage -- final Stage II -- was to occur when AWIPS reached Build 6, when AWIPS would be equipped with formatters and all the forecaster would do is manipulate the model and then the system would generate all the forecasts. The California Wildfire Group felt that until Build 6 was proven, they wanted to keep the current fire weather program intact. This is why we have the CWCG/NWS agreement, which the NWS would like to redefine,' or break. Even last year the NWS was telling Congress they would have Build 6 done by this year. But several months ago the NWS realized they were out of money for AWIPS -- and still only at Build 4 -- so they went to Congress and said they could call AWIPS complete at Build 4 if they could keep 64 of the FTEs they were supposed to cut -- 16 for multiple radar sites, 11 for the Alaska Headquarters, and 37 for FIRE WEATHER. The NWS went on to say that AWIPS would not fully support fire weather until Build 6. Congress gave them the positions, and AWIPS is now going be commissioned in 1999 with Build 4. Build 5 will cost $20 to $30 million, and there is no estimate on Build 6. The NWS is now saying the 37 FTEs were core forecasters to help support the fire weather program."

METEOROLOGISTS UNDER THEIR DESKS

And what do the fire weather specialists think? Well, things have been a bit antagonistic. One of the NWS goals is to "maintain an exemplary partnership with the employees union to promote mission responsibility and to create a healthy work environment that attracts the best and brightest employees." This is more than a little ironic, considering the number of employees who disagree with the plans and modernization moves and who now are afraid to speak up publicly for fear of reprisal. Some of them say they've learned that you support modernization or you're out of a career -- it's the MAR way or the highway.

It's too bad that we IMETs must work about under this cloak of secrecy, but this situation is a "hot" subject and I must protect myself until things change," says one. "I don't want my identity known," says another. "That may be a bit over paranoid, but better over than under. Some of us have been transferred and demoted because of disagreements over MAR."

"None of the IMETs have ever been physically fired for speaking up about MAR," says another, "and very likely none ever will. However, it's already been shown that the IMET can be disciplined by management. It's also very very likely that any further advancement of the IMET's met career in the NWS will come to a screeching halt if the IMET rocks the boat' too much." Said another: "I think the fire weather program will be watered down to uselessness if the mainstream weather offices absorb all of the fire weather program. Fire weather will become a mediocrity rather than the successful standout it has always been."

"All specialized fire weather units have been decommissioned now," says one of the mets. "Core forecasters are training now to take over the fire weather program everywhere. The fire weather program, as we knew it, has now ceased to exist. It's flatlined." Another wrote that two IMETs had been reprimanded for speaking out about MAR, and that one was disciplined by being stripped of IMET duties.

Training repeatedly crops up in discussions with fire mets, and they seem uniformly worried about this topic. "One of the issues that I personally care about when it comes to fire weather is training," wrote one. "When I first started in Fire Wx, I was able to be dedicated to the program year round, because that was the position at the time. A person could truly become a specialist in this field. A supervisor once told me that it takes about four or five years to really understand and get to know the Fire Wx program and what our users need to do things right. It takes time to do it right. But in the last couple years, because of MAR, dedication to this specialty is gone...gone...gone. True Fire Wx forecasters have to possess a real love for the job, and the pool of this type of person is decreasing at this time. But look at how the NWS is approaching the issue of training all forecasters. Each one is to become a jack-of-all-trades' forecaster. We are to pump out all different types of forecasts, but we'll specialize in none. If I have a specific medical problem, I like to see a specialist instead of a general practitioner."

Several fire mets wrote to scoff at the NWS management claims about the level of service provided. "The NWS is telling the users that all forecasters are being trained in fire weather, and that there will be no degradation of services.' How can there not be a degradation of service, when for years, we had dedicated forecasters, and now we have forecasters that don't know anything about the program providing forecasts!"

This debate about a "degradation of services" originates in the NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION AUTHORIZATION ACT OF 1997 where Section 101 (NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE) specifies that the agency "...may not close, automate, or relocate any field office unless the Secretary has certified to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Science of the House of Representatives that such action will not result in degradation of service to the affected area." Several sections of language specifying how that "certification" was to take place were later struck from Section 706 of the NWS Modernization Act -- the Section on restructuring field offices.

UNFUNDED MODERNIZATION vs. FIRE SPECIALISTS

And the AWIPS system? Is that going to help transition the core forecasters? The fire mets don't think so. "Despite a lot of talk about how important the fire weather program is, the new NWS computer system, AWIPS, does not include analysis or forecasts of fire weather indices like the Haines Index." How reassuring.

One fire met from the West, who was dispatched to Florida for the fire siege there, had warnings and forecasts questioned and overridden by the Florida NWS offices -- which were modernized by MAR, by the way -- even though those warnings and forecasts later proved to be correct. As of July 4, according to one IMET, there were nine of them deployed on wildfire duty in Florida. "At least six of them were from the West, and several others were deployed in New Mexico and Texas. All of these western IMETs are experienced forecasters left over from the fire weather program in the pre-MAR days. The reason so few eastern IMETS are deployed on the Florida fires is exactly why the IMET issue has become so contentious. Namely, The managers of the Florida NWS offices have few trained IMETs and wouldn't let them off office shift to go to fire camp anyway. It took several days of haggling to get just one of those eastern IMETs released off graveyard shift so that he could be deployed at fire camp ICP with the overhead team."

Here is the most destructive wildfire outbreak in Florida's history," added the IMET, "but the NWS can't be bothered to release IMETs from office duty to actually go to the fire. Yet, during the whole episode, NWS continues to assure land management agencies that fire weather is a high priority program under MAR."

Another IMET explains, "The NWS has IMETs, who are the trained fire weather forecasters who go to wildfires. The NWS also has Fire Weather Program Leaders (FWPLs) in those offices that have fire weather programs but which don't have IMETs. In the Western U.S. our IMETs and FWPLs are the same persons. However, in the Eastern U.S. and in the South not all FWPLs are IMETs. The NWS, in the East and South, has always treated fire weather as a step-child; they feel their main programs are severe thunderstorms and hurricanes. One of the concerns of the NWCG Fire Weather Team is that as the NWS moves into MAR, the dedicated fire weather forecaster will be replaced by core forecasters who are full qualified fire weather forecasters' -- and some of these core forecasters will be IMET-qualified. What happened in Florida this year is that as fire bust started, the agencies asked for IMETs. The NWS could not provide IMETs from the East or South because they had them on shift working as core forecasters. At the Tampa Bay NWS office, the FWPL -- not IMET-qualified -- was on shift and not available to the fire agencies or any of the out-of-region IMETs. Since the Southern IMETs were on shift, the Western region of the NWS, where there are dedicated fire weather forecasters who work day shift during fire season, saved their asses. All the forecasters assigned to fires were qualified IMETs, and most of them came from the West. There is a debate currently between the NWS and the fire agencies on dedicated' vs. full-qualified.' If the NWS continues with MAR, the program in the West will begin to look like the program in the South, and we will find a lot of the IMETs working rotating shifts during fire season and unavailabe for dispatch."

Another IMET says a Type I team requested two IMETs in Alaska this year -- support for 24-hour operations -- and that request was met by second-guessing, reticence, and skepticism by NWS management. The agency denied another request to send a trainee, because that person could not be spared from the night shift at the NWS office. "I'm telling you this because I truly care about the program," he wrote. "And I care about firefighter safety! When I make reference to the user, I'm talking about fire folks in the U.S. Forest Service, BLM, State Forestry, and anyone else that is directly related to the program."

"The the user agencies had better get moving on developing some kind of weather program," wrote another fire met, "because the level of support from the National McWeather Service is going to be slim at best."

SETTING UP THEIR OWN FIRE WEATHER

Developing their own fire weather is exactly what Florida's done, according to Jim Brenner of the Florida Division of Forestry. "We keep very close tabs on the NWS in connection to this," he says. "We were very close to the issue when they closed the Ag Weather Stations and when they cut us out of the spot forecast for prescribed fire. In order to get around this we have set up the MM5 model to run on our machines here in Forest Protection. We have spent a lot of money to purchase the kind of equipment and resources that will alow us to do our own forecasting. ... We have a new position starting -- a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science who is very sharp and will be assisting us in this effort. We plan to be able to issue spot forecasts over the Internet within the next few months. As the saying goes -- if you want it done right -- do it yourself. At one point the NWS indicated that the reason for their cutting out assistance for non-federal was because the private sector wanted to take it over. It quickly became apparent that the private sector wanted no part of the liability associated with giving spot forecasts for prescribed fire, and the NWS story has now changed -- how do you hold water in your hand?"

GAPS IN RADAR -- WHAT'S DOPPLER GOT TO DO WITH FIRE?

Doppler radar maps provided by the NWS illustrate another technical problem and a major discrepancy in fire weather services. Consider that fire behavior is influenced by weather, fuels, and topography; of these, weather is the most variable and the most critical to understand. Because fire weather occurs on the micro-scale and is greatly influenced by terrain, areas with severe terrain hold the potential for the kinkiest fire weather. However, the NWS radar maps show significant bands of country throughout the West that are unseen by the radar, and several of the neglected areas are traditional fire hotspots. There's a solid blanket of coverage over Tornado Alley in the Midwest, but the blank spots in the West are more than a little worrisome. And why should you care about radar coverage for fire weather? "The benefit of Doppler radar is not in its predictive ability," says Day. "Its benefit is as a now-cast' tool -- as opposed to a forecast tool -- showing you in real-time what's going on with storms and fronts and severe weather. You can see the wind and moisture and where it is -- and where a thunderstorm for instance might produce flash flooding. As an intermediate to long-range predictive tool it's not very useful; its value in fire weather is in its real-time ability to look at an active storm and get a good characterization of what it's doing and how that's going to affect near-term fire behavior."

The law that authorized the MAR program says that NWS offices can be closed only at locations where there will be no degradation of services. Who makes that determination, though, and how a degradation of services is defined, is not clearly spelled out. Fire agency people are pretty sure that degradation has either happened or is about to happen, and some point to the experiment at Boise as proof. Several years ago the NWS and the National Fire Weather Advisory Group (NFWAG) cooperated on a study called the Boise Risk Reduction Project in order to test the core forecaster concept. An assessment team fover two fire seasons compared forecasts produced by experienced fire mets and by core forecasters for the Payette National Forest.

"When compared side by side, at the end of each year, the results showed that a better and more accurate product was generated by the experienced fire mets," says Day. "The work by the core forecasters just didn't produce the degree of accuracy needed by fire weather users."

"No, the core forecasters didn't do as well," says Stokols. "But they did identify a major weakness in what we were trying to do with the Interactive Coded Weather Forecast (ICWF) where the computer assists you. It didn't work out West -- the terrain is too complex. So we came back to headquarters and said We've got to do this a different way.' We have involved our storm prediction center; they're experts in small-scale phenomena, and we're tasking them to develop guidance for us on a national basis."

Without good statistics to track the value of fire weather services and accurate comparisons of quality of services, this issue could remain a bickering match of no-you-didn't-yes-we-did for a long time. It's not just the NWS that does a poor job of tracking fire weather statistics; the fire agencies don't really have in hand the proof they need to persuade the NWS and its Congressional sources of funding that this really is a blowup situation. "It's hard to explain, when we've had the IMETs as resources, what our losses would have been without them," acknowledges Coats. "In the Southeast, 80-something percent of our fires are people-caused, whether from arson or negligence or debris burning that gets away. We still have to suppress those fires, though, and there's something we as an agency don't capture well -- the statistics on what we save because we got a good forecast and we were able to stop that fire."

The fire agencies, though they don't have much for evidence of resources saved, do have far better records on losses; the NWS has some glaring holes in theirs. "The problem is the way they keep their statistics," explains Forbes. "The Paint Fire in Santa Barbara, for example, lost 700 homes, but the Weather Service shows no loss of life or property for that, because they weren't lightning starts."

The NWS tracking of fire weather losses provides an interesting window into why the agency doesn't put much of a focus on the importance of fire weather. The figures for 1995, for example (www.nws.noaa.gov/om/95sum.htm) list fatalities, injuries, and damage in millions of dollars. Hail that year accounted for 150 injuries. Lightning caused 433 injuries and 85 fatalities. Drought accounted for $62.6 million in damages but no fatalities nor injuries. One fatality was attributed to fog. And fire weather? Zero injuries, zero fatalities, and a mere $200,000 in property damage. Fire agency records, though, indicate that there were 15 fire-related fatalities in 1995. Now, to be sure, not all of those can be attributed to fire weather -- but that was the year of the Kuna Fire, which most definitely had a fire weather component to it. If you're still not sure the NWS is missing something here, take a look at the figures for 1994 (www.nws.noaa.gov/om/94sum.htm). That year, according to NIFC figures, we lost 34 people. Yes, that included aircraft crashes and vehicle turnovers, but there's no way the NWS can justify their numbers when they claim that fire weather in 1994 accounted for two injuries, $342 million in property losses, and zero fatalities.

Perhaps the number crunchers at the NWS need to take a look at the South Canyon report.

IS PRIVATIZATION A SOLUTION?

If the fire agencies don't have the budget to hire all the fire mets, and the NWS isn't going to do it, what about private weather companies? Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, wrote last year about how the "... government is still doing a lot of things it doesn't need to do, or that is already being done in the business sector - much less expensively and more efficiently. Take the National Weather Service." Lambro wrote that about 300 businesses now provide weather forecasts to the public on a for-profit basis. He said more than 85 percent of the nation's weather forecasts are provided by commercial companies, and that one of these, AccuWeather, now has more than 10,000 customers in business, government and the news media.

Sounds good, but it doesn't look like this will be the case with fire weather in the near future.

The CEO of AccuWeather, at a hearing of the House Science Energy & Environment Subcommittee (chaired by Ken Calvert, R-CA), testified that private companies can provide fire weather. The Subcommittee, in review of the FY1999 budgets, including that of the NWS, quizzed Joel Myers, president of AccuWeather, pretty closely about this. Former nuclear scientist and university professor Rep.Vern Ehlers (R-MI) questioned Myers about fire weather, but was assured that private companies can provide fire weather forecasting. The fire mets, though, disagree vehemently.

"Here's an example of what happens when we privatize," says one. "Try to find the realtime lightning data on the internet -- I don't think you can. The lower 48 states Lightning Data System was sold by the BLM to a contractor who is selling the data back to them. But they can't make that info available to anyone who has not paid for it. It makes sense. In Alaska, though, the LDS was not sold, because no one wanted to buy it. Alaska not a big enough market. So, in privatization of weather services, the small markets would get no service, and the big market areas would get tons.

"There would also be no guaranteed consistency," he adds. "There sort of is, with the NWS, but only sort of -- because of all the nonsense going on now with MAR. If the Weather Service got out of fire weather, there would probably be fire weather forecasters getting out of the NWS and wanting to do fire weather for private companies -- their own, maybe? -- or for the fire agencies. Privatization of fire weather forecasting has been investigated, and no one is interested."

Forbes agrees. "A group of us sanctioned by the CWCG requested information from the private fire weather providers," she says. "And not one company responded. In some instances, privatization is the answer, but I also have a responsibility to the taxpayer. The Weather Service gives us the information, and if we go to a private company we pay big bucks for it. One company here, when I inquired about it, said it would cost me roughly $30,000 for basic information for six months, and it would be $2100 per day if they report to an incident. Based on what our fire seasons average here, that would have cost me about a half million dollars that I don't have."

And what's likely to come of the privatization chats between commercial weather companies and Congress? Well, Congress did authorize some funding for the NWS, to help with the deployment of new technology. The report details, in Subsection 101(c), the authorization of $15 million for FY1998 for the "acquisition and deployment of new NEXRAD systems identified as necessary to prevent a degradation of weather service in NWS follow-up studies to the Secretary's Report toCongress on Adequacy of NEXRAD Coverage and Degradation of Weather Services Under the National Weather Service Modernization for 32 Areas of Concern and recommended and approved by the Secretary."

And privatization? "...the Committee expects that NWS will still work to reduce staff and overhead, close unneeded weather service offices, and terminate services the private sector is willing and able to provide."

SOLUTIONS??

Any solution to this controversy will have to incorporate several aspects of fire weather and interagency cooperation. "A lot of us who have been passionate about fire weather are trying to make sure that the program works," says Gorski. "Hopefully we can hash the differences out and come to some sort of compromise. Some people have the opinion it should be delivered in a particular way, and we're struggling back and forth on how to provide that information to them. I guarantee you that both the NWS and the agencies will work the issues out to where we have the firefighter safety in the best way we can provide that."

"We need to get together as federal agencies," says Stokols. "We're not even on the NWCG, and maybe we need to be. That's a proposal that the team may come back with. Right now most of the work we do with the users is at a working level, and maybe it needs to be at the policy level."

The value of adding a NWS seat to the NWCG is debatable; one way or the other, though, the NWS will have to get a good grip on the connection between dedicated fire weather meteorologists and the safety of not only the crews on the line but also the residents of the wildland/urban interface. A new and accurate system for tracking statistics on fire weather would be a good start. Serious and comprehensive training for any forecaster assigned to fire weather can't be optional. Forging working relationships with commercial providers should be explored by both the NWS and the fire agencies. And the NWS, despite its other critical obligations and mandates, simply must adequately address the fire weather issue -- even if that includes the admittedly tough challenge of getting the House Appropriations Committee to understand what the wildland fire community is up against here. No one wants to see national treasures such as Yellowstone ablaze, and no one wants to re-visit the tragedies of the 1994 fire season.

"One of the things we learned at South Canyon," says Day, "is that we have to assess risk wherever it is. Every person's job includes the responsibility to assess risk and do something about it. And it's not just the people on the line for whom we have a responsibility toward safety and risk assessment. We recognize the concerns brought about by MAR and we have to respond to them; we're trying to do everything we can to make sure the NWS plans don't put our people and the public at risk. We don't want these problems to result in accidents or losses or fatalities or even close calls. One difference between the fire agencies and the Weather Service is that they don't have to go knock on someone's door and tell them, I'm sorry, but your son is not coming home.'"

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE INFO & CONTACTS:

NWS Offices

Staff directory

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MODERNIZATION ACT
Search Thomas for "National Weather Service Modernization Act" or for H.R. 1278 or for S.271 or for S.2360

FEDERAL WILDLAND FIRE POLICY:

www.fs.fed.us/land/wdfire.htm

NOTE: This story is © 1998 Kelly Andersson and may not be reproduced or distributed without written permission. For information on reprint rights email Kelly Andersson.

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