How Do You Rate This Publication?       

Title:	Smoke Management: Toward a Data Base to Validate PB-Piedmont - Numerical Simulation of Smoke on the Ground at Night
Author(s):	Achtemeier, Gary L.
Date:	1999
Source:	Proceedings of the 1999 TAPPI Internatinal Enviromental Conference, April 18-21, 1999, Nashville, TEnnessee, Opryland Hotel, Vol. 2
Description:	The use of fire for controlled burning to meet objectives for silviculture or for ecosystem management carries the risk of liability for smoke. Near-ground smoke can degrade air quality, reduce visibility, aggravate health problems, and create a general nuisance. At night, smoke can locally limit visibility over roadways creating serious hazards to transportation. PB-Piedmont, a numerical model designed to simulate smoke movement at night over irregular terrain similar to that of the Piedmont of the Southeastern United States, is becoming available for use by land managers. PB-Piedmont has the potential to significantly influence management decisions and therefore must be subject to thorough validation. Decisions based on an incompletely validated model can be worse than decisions made with no model at all. This paper summarizes a project designed to acquire the necessary validation data - remote measurements of smoke on the ground taken from the air with an intensified multi-spectral video camera capable of amplifying light up to 15.000 times. The project tested the hypothesis that smoke trapped near ground at night scatters sufficient moonlight to be observed from an aircraft. Smoke movement was recorded on Super VHS tape for two nighttime prescribed fires timed to coincide with moonlight and clear sky and near calm weather conditions. Selected images for the first night. 20 March 1997. demonstrate the complexity of near-ground smoke plumes. Image data were transferred to U.S. Geological Suney elevation maps. Small variations in elevation such as gaps in ridges are critical to smoke movement. PB-Piedmont must accurately simulate smoke movement at night on terrain scales that smoke "sees".
	View and Print this Publication (204 KB)
Pristine Version:	An uncaptured or "pristine" version of this publication is available. It has not been subjected to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and therefore does not have any errors in the text. However it is a larger file size and some people may experience long download times. The "pristine" version of this publication is available here: View and Print the PRISTINE copy of this Publication (882 KB)
Publication Notes:	We recommend that you also print this page and attach it to the printout of the article, to retain the full citation information. This article was written and prepared by U.S. Government employees on official time, and is therefore in the public domain. Our on-line publications are scanned and captured using Adobe Acrobat. During the capture process some typographical errors may occur. Please contact the SRS Webmaster, srswebmaster@fs.fed.us if you notice any errors which make this publication unuseable.
	Get the latest version of the Adobe Acrobat reader or Acrobat Reader for Windows with Search and Accessibility