Since initial development of the Fire Weather Portal began ten years ago, the number of resources covering fire in North Carolina has steadily grown to the point that one tool can no longer contain them all!
That’s why we’re launching this fire-focused website, supported by the NC Forest Service — as a gateway to fire weather resources and information.
The Fire Weather Intelligence Portal remains front and center as the go-to monitoring tool for weather and fire risk information. We’re also moving the Portal documentation into a friendlier new user guide explaining the Portal datasets and functionality, including real-world examples.
Through our decade-long partnership between the State Climate Office and the NC Forest Service, we have developed supplemental tools to aid Forest Service staff and their forestry colleagues in North Carolina explore specific weather stations and hazard risk. These can be accessed via our Resources for NCFS page.
Separate from the Portal, we are also assisting fire weather monitoring and planning through the creation of monthly weather outlooks centered on North Carolina. View those on our Short-Range Outlooks page, and follow the instructions to join our email list if you’d like to receive them in your inbox as new outlooks are released each month.
To help capture the extensive knowledge base surrounding weather, climate, and fire, we are creating background information pages on topics such as seasonal fire climatology, North Carolina’s fire history, and likely impacts from climate change.
In the months ahead, we will also be documenting findings from past and ongoing research projects related to fire risk and fire datasets that we’ve conducted at the State Climate Office.
As new information and outlooks are posted, and as changes are made to the Fire Weather Intelligence Portal, we will announce those via this blog — The underSTORY — which will further help aggregate fire-relevant resources.
Together with our partners at NC Forest Service, on the NC Fire Environment Committee, and in organizations around the state, we’re excited about the start of a new decade in fire weather monitoring, management, and research. We look forward to sharing those stories on this website and making it even easier to track the challenging phenomenon of fire in North Carolina.