SmokeCast

SmokeCast shows where wildfire smoke is now and where it is headed, hour by hour for the next 3 days, so you can plan around it. Pick the clear trailhead instead of the smoky one. Reschedule a soccer game. Close the windows before the smoke arrives, and know when it will pass. Before you see the map, SmokeCast corrects NOAA's forecast with live readings from about 1,200 EPA air monitors. Then it grades itself in public, every night. How it works SmokeCast starts with NOAA's RRFS smoke model. It compares the model to what EPA monitors are measuring right now and adjusts the forecast to match. Each night it checks yesterday's forecasts against what monitors actually measured and posts the score at smokecast.org/accuracy.html. Recent results: a typical miss of about 8.9 AQI points, and 88% of forecasts within 25 points of the measured value. The raw model misses by 12.1 and manages 79%.…