Public health applications of historical smoke forecasts: An evaluation of archived BlueSky data for the coterminous United States, 2015-2018.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Wildfires are increasing in magnitude, frequency, and severity. Populations in the wildland-urban interface and in downwind communities are at increased risk of exposure to elevated concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) and other harmful components of wildfire smoke. We conducted this analysis to evaluate the use of modeled predictions of wildfire smoke to create county-level measures of smoke exposure for public health research and surveillance.

Methods

We evaluated four years (2015-2018) of grid-based North American Mesoscale (NAM)-derived PM_2.5 forecasts from the U.S. Forest Service BlueSky modeling framework with monitoring data from the Environmental Protection Agency Air Quality System (AQS), the Interagency Monitoring of Pr

SUBMITTER: Michael R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11296727 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature