The RMRS Rocky Mountain Center (RMC) is part of the USFS RMRS Fire, Fuel and Smoke Science Program. The RMC Team is engaged in development and deployment of science-based computer applications for real-time delivery of high-resolution fire-weather intelligence and fire danger forecasts over the Continental USA (CunUS). Our vision is to provide comprehensive weather support to wildland fire operations, prescribed burns, and air resource management.

Our Mission

The strategic goal of RMC is to:
 
• Help accomplish agency prescribed burning targets;
• Help burn safer;
• Help burn cleaner and avoid air quality problems;
• Help combat wildfire with relevant weather intelligence;
• Facilitate rapid implementation of new weather information products;
 
Our long-term vision is to solve problems of fire management by providing regional simulations of weather and weather-dependent phenomena including fire danger, wildfire ignition and growth.

Operational Products

We deliver real-time spatially explicit hourly information about current and future values of weather elements such as air temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed and wind direction, as well as important fire indices (i.e. Ventilation, Haines, and Fosberg Index). Weather forecasts and analysis are performed over the Conterminous USA at 4-km and 6-km resolution. Forecasts extend up to 7 days into the future. Web products are produced for ConUS, and numerous sub-domains covering territorial units managed by the GACC offices as well as many individual states.

In addition, we provide real-time forecasts of lightning probabilities and the chance of wildfire ignitions on a 20-km grid over ConUS and Alaska. These are unique products not avilable from any other Land-Management Agency in the USA. The RMC information products are delivered to operational users and the general public via the World Wide Web in the form of interactive 2-D maps, point forecasts, and data fields.

Weather forecasts are generated by the latest version of the NCAR Weather Research Forecast (WRF) messoscale model. We also utilize output from the NCEI GFS global model to produce lighning and wilffire-ignition probability forecasts.

WRF runs 4 times per day. Intitial conditions are provided by the NOAA High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model. Boundary conditions are extracted from the NCEI NAM and GFS models. RMC fire-weather forecasts are generated on a 320-CPU Core Parallel Super-computer running Rocky Linux OS.