Abstract:

Wildfires bring significant public and economic impact to California each year, with extreme events bringing billion dollar disasters to the state. The National Weather Service in Los Angeles/Oxnard strives to be on the cutting edge of science and service to bring optimal decision support for fire agencies in Southern California. The goal of this decision support is to enable fire agencies to better plan staffing and resource levels for rapid initial attack in order to help minimize the threat for loss of life and property. In this presentation, I will discuss some key meteorological features in predicting extreme fire conditions, and discuss the methods on how we disseminate these forecasts for decision support. Additionally, our fire weather support assists our fire and emergency management partners in making evacuation decisions and our collaboration with these agencies helps to amplify our fire weather preparedness messages to the media and the general public.