Cal Fire FRAP Lecture Series, public health and fire smoke

News & Articles about air quality
#1

This group might find interest in interesting research from California regarding public health, prescribed and wild fire smoke. There is a Cal Fire FRAP (Fire resource Assessment Program) webinar page with past and future lectures:
https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-resource-assessment-program/frap-webinars-and-events

While we are waiting for the 29 May 2024 lecture to be uploaded, we can catch up with a November 2022 companion study:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZi8G_PRlmE (36 minute Youtube video of the webinar)

These studies have taken air quality monitoring data and included them in their models to anticipate what the public exposure to smoke might be under an increased prescribed fire regime.

The takeaway from these lectures is that California needs to prepare and deploy its public health resources to address population impacts from prescribed fire. Increasing prescribed fire has many benefits and one trade off will be an increase in chronic low level smoke exposure from prescribed fire in exchange for decreasing acute extreme level smoke exposure from wildfires and conflagrations. Improving these models involves expanding the network of air quality monitoring stations. I think this group might be able to help with that data gap.

#2

@derek this is interesting.

Are you involved in this research? Anika, our in-house scientist runs our research network. Let me know if you are interested to be on the mailing list.

https://www.airgradient.com/research/

#3

I am not involved in this research. I am on their mailing list, so if an upcoming presentation is interesting and I have free time in my day, I’ll listen to the presentations while I do other work. Because of my air quality monitoring hobby (thanks AirGradient!), topics like these catch my attention more quickly.

The only downside is, for later release on Youtube they cut out the questions at the end of the lecture. If you listen in live, you get all the good discussion at the end. Good discussion like the researchers lamenting a data gap in the available sensor network. They would love to be able to deploy a sensor network at regular intervals from the smoke source (prescribed and wild fire). I look at it another way, where different sensor networks can be brought together to get closer to an ideally distributed network. In a perfect world, I would like someone to use the data from my outdoor sensor for something greater than my own curiosity.