An End-to-End Evaluation of NOAA's Emerging Wildland Fire Detection and Warning Capabilities

From June 10-14th, 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) newly established Fire Weather Testbed (FWT) conducted its first in-person evaluation of this collaborative approach as well as NOAA's emerging wildland fire detection and warning capabilities, specifically: 1) NESDIS Next Generation Fire System (NGFS) and NWS Hotspot Notification Tool (HSNT); 2) Tactical Integrated Warning Team (IWT) for Fire Operations; 3) Fire Warnings Issued through the Tactical Integrated Warning Team Paradigm.

The FWT invited NWS fire weather meteorologists and their high-level state land management partners from four U.S. states to understand if and how these emerging technologies, products, and services could be implemented outside of the Southern Great Plains. Throughout the evaluation, pairs of meteorologists and fire managers were grouped by state to form four Tactical IWTs, representing regions with varying firefighting capabilities, fire ecologies, and population distributions.

These mock Tactical IWTs engaged in seven displaced real-time simulations of recent fire outbreaks. Each simulated IWT received new fire starts detected by the NGFS and sent through the HSNT. If and when the land managers decided to issue a Fire Warning, the meteorologist drew a polygon covering the area of Fire Warning issuance and issued the warning.

Data was gathered from participants via pre- and post-evaluation surveys and end-of-day roundtable discussions. At the end of the week, the FWT evaluators facilitated two private focus group discussions with participants–one for meteorologists and one for land managers–that were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed by the FWT. Findings from this evaluation are data-driven, while recommendations are both data-driven and informed/contextualized by FWT expertise.

This data provides the semi-structured focus group questionnaire and the surveys used to collect evaluation data.