Joint Fire Science Program
Spot Forecast Verification Project

This website uses innovative techniques for interactive data exploration to analyze a large set of spot weather forecasts issued by the National Weather Service. Spot forecasts are requested by local, state, and federal officials when a situation arises that requires a detailed short-term weather forecast to ensure the safety of those involved in search and rescue, hazardous materials, and wildland fire operations. A large number of these forecasts have been compared as part of my graduate research to both surface weather observations and the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD).

Above are tabbed links to pages exploring different subsets of the 100,000+ spot forecast database spanning from April 2009 to August 2013. "All Spot Forecasts" takes you to a page where you can look at all of the spot forecasts in the dataset based on which Weather Forecast Office (WFO) issued them, as well as by the purpose for which the forecast was issued. You can also use the interactive histograms to filter the forecasts by lead time and by month in which they were issued. The histograms and map (right) will adjust based on the placement of the "brushes" on the histograms themselves.

"All Prescribed" and "All Wildfires" contain subsets that have been analyzed for my research. They are not inclusive of all of the spot weather forecasts for Prescribed Burns and Wildland Fires, rather they have been selected based on specific characteristics such as time of issuing and proximity to a surface observation. These pages contain more versatile interactive histograms (below) that explore how the spot forecast compares to the nearest well-maintained and sited weather station, as well as how the forecast compared to the more broad NDFD forecast. Above the map are a few statistics that boil down how the spot forecast did relative to the NDFD forecasts, while below the map are a number of graphs that further stratify the relative accuracy of each forecast. THESE GRAPHS WORK BEST IN GOOGLE CHROME. All of these graphics update dynamically as you select different subsets.

"Prescribed By WFO" and "Wildfires By WFO" allow the subsets found in "All Prescribed" and "All Wildfires" to be further divided by WFO or by NWS Region. This allows the same exploration that was discussed concerning the previous two pages, only on a more geographically regional level. While forecast characteristics and practices may vary from office to office, by selecting a WFO, the hope is that you are getting a relatively homogeneous set of forecasts, even while the actual forecaster may change.

Most of the credit for these multivariate data exploration tools has to go to Jason Davies and Square, developers of Crossfilter. The plots were built with D3.

The raw spot forecasts and requests can be found under "Raw Data" above. Many thanks to the Joint Fire Science Program for their support, as well as my advisor, Dr. John Horel.

Below are examples of a spot forecast request (on the left) and the top section of the corresponding spot forecast (right) from the recent Patch Springs fire in Northern Utah.