Climate Ecosystem Fire Applications (CEFA)

Program Description

The Climate, Ecosystem and Fire Applications (CEFA) program provides products and information related to climate, weather, fire and natural resources nationwide and internationally. Collaborating with numerous federal, state and international wildland fire and land management agencies, CEFA provides data, information and decision-support tools for planning and policy.

The primary functions of CEFA are:

Perform studies and applied research to improve the understanding of relationships between climate, weather, fire and ecosystems.
Develop decision-support tools for fire applications incorporating climate and weather information.
Serve as a liaison between the fire, natural resource and scientific research communities by providing product training, education, science delivery, and eliciting user feedback.
Provide experimental fire weather, fire danger, fire behavior and smoke dispersion/transport forecasting products for operations and research.
Perform societal interactions studies emphasizing partnerships and the role of climate in planning and policy.
Provide climate and weather information directly for fire and ecosystem decision-making and strategic planning.

The Climate, Ecosystem and Fire Application program was formed on October 1, 1998, through an assistance agreement between the Bureau of Land Management Nevada State Office and DRI.

CEFA resides within the Division of Atmospheric Sciences of DRI, and is integrated with the Western Regional Climate Center.

CEFA utilizes modern computing laboratories for data analysis and scientific visualization supporting the applications products that are routinely produced for wildland fire management agencies.

CEFA includes both operational support products and applications research. Examples include:

Products

California and Nevada Smoke and Air Committee (CANSAC): https://cansac.dri.edu/cansac_output.php?model=WRF
Hourly Fire Danger for California: https://cefa.dri.edu/HourlyFD/Nelson/animate/
National FCAMMS Smoke Dispersion Forecast Guidance: https://cefa.dri.edu/FCAMMS/
Grand air quality: https://cefa.dri.edu/GrandCanyon/gcaq.php

Current and recent projects

Modeling of Smoke Inversions using WRF
Physical and societal understanding of extreme fire events
National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) drought-wildfire nexus
Developing a Wildfire Component for the NIDIS California Drought Early Warning System
Building online tools to assess smoke and fog combined high-impact events (Superfog)
Risk and decision making in wildland fire management
Determining criteria for messaging NWS Red Flag warnings
Understanding the impact of climate change on fire weather variables in Victoria, Australia
Developing a fire weather and fire danger historical climatology for Victoria, Australia

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