PyreCast

Platform for viewing active fires and forecasting likely spread

Solution Application

Forests and Agriculture Management

Open Source

Actionable Near Term Wildfire Forecasting

PyreCast empowers agencies and individuals to make decisions regarding evacuation orders, suppression and containment strategies, power grid shut-offs, and more by providing them with near real-time fire updates, fire spread forecasts, and fire risk assessments.

Created by SIG as part of the Pyregence Consortium, PyreCast allows users to visualize data from three primary wildfire risk forecasting tools. Active Fires gives users real-time information about fire size and location with an animated fourteen-day fire spread forecast. Risk Forecast models potential fire behavior across a landscape under varying weather conditions to identify areas of greatest risk. Fire Weather Forecast provides forecasts of crucial weather parameters and indices over sixteen days.

Technical Data

System Capabilities

Active Fires. Shows the locations of actively burning fires as sensed remotely with satellite and aircraft heat detection and provides forecasts of where they are projected to spread across a landscape over the next five days.
Risk Forecast. Works by igniting hundreds of millions of hypothetical fires across the landscape and modeling their spread under forecasted weather conditions over a five-day time horizon; the interface shows which areas are at greatest risk from fires if an ignition were to occur.
Fire Weather. Provides eight-day forecasts, updated every six hours of key weather parameters affecting wildfire behavior, including temperature, relative humidity, wind, and fire weather indices.

System Support

Open Science for Public Benefit

PyreCast is an open science, web-based platform with both free and paid tiers for land managers to get real time fire updates, fire spread forecasts, and fire risk assessments. PyreCast allows agencies and other landowners to make critical decisions quickly, informed by the most up to date data and models.

The Pyregence Consortium is a multidisciplinary team established in 2019 to advance wildfire science and build next-generation fire models as part of a California Energy Commission EPIC-funded project. The Consortium makes its tools free and available to all, while also providing access to all underlying models, inputs, and datasets.

Pyrecast – Easy-To-Use Near-Term Fire Forecasting Tools For Improved Wildfire Situational Awareness

Advanced Customization

While Pyrecast’s main user base is utilities and government agencies, SIG built Pyrecast with a flexible software infrastructure that’s designed to be customized for other users as well. Advanced users have access to a suite of fire modeling microservices that are accessible either via an API or directly through the Pyrecast website. All data displayed on Pyrecast can be imported into other systems, and SIG is able to develop customized software and interfaces to support a client’s unique wildfire monitoring needs.

Pyrecast Views Selections

An Indispensable Tool

PyreCast has attracted a dedicated core of users who praise its ease of use and timeliness. Users at the US Forest Service, for example, appreciate that it combines weather, risk, and active fire spread forecasts on one platform. Managers at the front lines of wildfire prevention and suppression praise PyreCast’s near instant access to a multi-view web map that includes weather, vegetation/fuels, topography, risk analysis, and fire spread predictions. And members of the public use it to monitor active fires near them. Packaged with a user-friendly interface, this powerful tool enables safer and more effective planning and operational wildfire response and management.

Notably, PyreCast is integrated into the Department of Energy’s (DOE) situation awareness North American Energy Resilience Model (NAERM) program) as part of a partnership with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).