News

September 23, 2024

We are pleased to announce that BlueSky Playground - Full is now available. The Full version of our ad-hoc, on-demand smoke modelling tool uses comprehensive fuel data to calculate emission rates, and includes an expert mode to allow users to customize individual parameters. You can access Playground - Full from the Playground page.

July 3, 2024

We are pleased to announce that a new, improved version of BlueSky Playground is now available. Playground is an ad-hoc, on-demand smoke modelling tool which allows users to create emissions scenarios for prescribed burns and wildfires, then model the resulting smoke dispersion. You can access Playground - Express from the Playground page; more advanced versions are under development.

June 19, 2024

A maintenance outage is planned for Thursday, June 20, 18:00-23:59 PDT (UTC-7) to upgrade network infrastructure in the data centre. Access to firesmoke.ca may be interrupted during this time.

November 1, 2023

We are now only publishing one smoke forecast per day now that the Canadian fire season is over (March 1 - October 31). This forecast is typically published around 15:00 UTC, depending on the number of fires burning, met forecast availability, etc.

July 19, 2023

We now have a French version of the website available. Look for the "Fr" link in the navbar at the top of each page to switch to French, and the corresponding "En" link to switch back to English.

July 18, 2023

Firesmoke.ca was down overnight July 16-17 due to a server outage. Smoke forecasts are now available again, but they may not accurately depict initial smoke conditions until the smoke modelling system has spun up the carryover smoke used to initialize each forecast.

July 16, 2023

Due to network issues this past weekend, smoke forecasts were produced with missing forecast hours and/or missing carryover smoke to initialize the forecast with. As a result, the smoke displayed on the current forecast did not accurately reflect the actual conditions. We have implemented changes to fix the network issues and are monitoring the forecasts to ensure this does not recur.

May 13, 2023

Public access will continue for smoke forecasts, fire weather forecasts, and all other services on FireSmoke Canada. The only service that will no longer be public is the SmartFire fire data acquisition, reconciliation and GIS database. Sorry for the confusion.

April 19, 2023

Public access to the SmartFire service will be discontinued April 30, 2023 for security reasons. Please contact Roland Schigas to discuss options if you rely on this service.

January 18, 2023

There are currently no active fires within our forecast domain, so the smoke forecast map is fixed at the last available forecast that our modelling system produced on January 2, 2023. Daily operational forecasts will resume once fire activity picks up again for the 2023 season. Update: As of Feb 1, daily operational forecasts have resumed.

July 15, 2022

The firesmoke.ca website and services will not be available for much of Saturday, July 23, 2022. Services such as Smoke Forecasts, Fire Weather Forecasts, SmartFire and Playground will be down completely for a maintenance outage from 07:00-11:00 PDT, and these services may be down intermittently for testing between 11:00-17:00 PDT. Thank you for your patience during this time.

September 1, 2021

The following improvements and bug fixes have been made to the smoke forecast interactive viewer:

• The Information sidebar has been replaced with a hidden drawer to maximize the visible forecast on small screens; click on the control in the top-right of the map to open the Information drawer.
• The animation control layout has been optimized to maximize the visible forecast on small screens.
• The datetime shown in the animation control is now Local time by default; click on the datetime to switch to UTC.
• URL parameters for latitude, longitude and zoom are now available, to allow users to load the forecast map centered and zoomed on a specific area.
• After panning and zooming the map, the forecast URL with parameters for the current latitude, longitude and zoom are available in the Tools section of the Information drawer for copying to the clipboard and bookmarking in your browser.
• The bug which pushed the animation controls off the screen below the fold on iOS and Android devices has been fixed.

Note: If the forecast map is not displaying correctly on your device, use Ctrl+F5 (PC) or Cmd+Shift+R (Mac) to force your browser to update your cache.

View the current smoke forecast at firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/.

July 22, 2021

Four video tutorials are now available, covering interpretation of the smoke and fire weather forecasts as well as using the Playground. These tutorials can be viewed on the WFRT BlueSky Tutorials playlist.

March 31, 2021

The four BlueSky Canada daily smoke forecasts have been upgraded with a larger domain, improved meteorology, and are now being produced using the new BlueSky Pipeline (BSP) modelling framework.

• The larger domain extends farther north, south and west and will improve the forecast by incorporating more emissions sources.
• The new meteorology extends the high-resolution 12 km forecast grid over more of the domain, and allows the use of nested 36 km meteorology instead of requiring interpolation during dispersion modelling.
• The new BSP framework improves emissions modelling and the integration of carryover smoke from previous forecasts.
• The BSP framework also positions BlueSky Canada to take advantage of new plume rise research and model development currently underway to further improve smoke forecasts.

View the current smoke forecast at firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/.

March 31, 2021

The beta BlueSky Canada Fire Weather Forecast (FWF) model is now operational and producing daily forecasts. The FWF is an impementation of the Fire Weather Index (FWI) System using BlueSky Canada gridded metorological forecasts, providing high-resolution spatial and temporal FWI forecast output for use in operational wildfire models and wildfire incident command briefings.

• FWI fuel moisture codes and indices are calculated at up to 4 km grid resolution with a two day forecast horizon.
• Weather-sensitive moisture codes and indices are resolved at one-hour temporal resolution, while less sensitive codes and indices are resolved once daily at noon local time.
• The FWF is available as an interactive map with point forecast functionality and active model comparison to observed meteorology and FWI values.

View the current FWF forecast at firesmoke.ca/forecasts/fireweather/current/.

More information about the FWF model is available at cerodell.github.io/fwf-docs/build/html/index.html.

October 7, 2020

There will be a firesmoke.ca service outage on Saturday, October 17, 2020 from 07:00 to 16:00 Pacific Time due to network maintenance. We recommend you load a smoke forecast into your browser on Friday, October 16 if you need one during the interruption.

April 1, 2020

A secure, encrypted version of this website is now available at https://firesmoke.ca/. For legacy compatibility reasons, the original unencrypted HTTP site will remain operational, and it will not be automatically redirected to the HTTPS site.

May 15, 2019

A new and improved forecast viewer has been released. Improvements include new basemap layer choices, better playback controls, a new fire outline overlay, new hotspots marking and clustering, an opacity control for the smoke layer, and a sidebar with comprehensive forecast and help information. Concurrently, we also simplified the forecast graphics to use six levels to make it easier to see transitions and to make the PM_2.5 values relate to national exposure standards. You can see the new viewer by visiting the current smoke forecast.

April 3, 2019

We have switched to a YlOrBr (yellow orange brown) colour scheme to display the different levels of PM2.5 on our smoke forecasts. This was done to improve accessibility for colour blind users and to improve contrast between levels when viewed in grayscale. Here is the new forecast legend we are using: