A controlled blaze in Utah could improve models of how wildfire smoke spreads

Starting in July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA plan to fly research planes over more than a dozen naturally occurring wildfires in the region, collecting data on how smoke plumes rise from a blaze. (The US National Science Foundation funded research flights over about 20 wildfires that summer, to study how the smoke chemistry evolved over time; those data are still being analysed.) Just as meteorologists have improved their predictions of severe weather in recent decades, fire scientists are now trying to improve their predictions of how smoke spreads so that people can prepare themselves, says Susan Prichard, a forest ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Source: www.nature.com