Released March 12, 2010
STILLWATER, Okla. – Millions of acres of Oklahoma land are burned every year through prescribed burning and wildfires. As a program of the Oklahoma Mesonet, the state’s automated weather station network, OK-FIRE provides a tool that is beneficial for all types of fires.
The Fire Prescription Planner is one of the many products on OK-FIRE, a weather-based Web site for wildland fire management.
“OK-FIRE has many applications, but the main ones are wildfire, prescribed fire and smoke management,” said J.D. Carlson, fire meteorologist in the department of biosystems and agricultural engineering in Oklahoma State University’s Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources.
The tool can be found by visiting http://okfire.mesonet.org. After selecting the Fire Prescription Planner icon, users will be faced with a screen where criteria for variables of interest, such as temperature, relative humidity, smoke dispersion conditions, wind speed and dead fuel moisture can be entered.
--continued on Oklahoma State University news
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