Weather Forecasts Relevant to Smoke

Forecasts

• National Weather Service (NWS)

  Ventilation<adjective measures the atmosphere's capacity to disperse pollution. It combines windspeed and mixing height, essentially measuring the size of the curtain of air that passes over a point on the edge of a fire. Prescribed burning in Colorado is seldom permitted if an inversion is likely to last all day, indicated by forecasted ventilation of 'poor' all day.

  spot forecasts, by office.  Spots are issued on request from a land management agency. 
  • Boulder
  • Grand Junction
  • Pueblo 
  • Tabular forecasts are available to anyone. 

Forecasts from entities other than NWS could be useful to you for other purposes but may not be used to establish smoke permit compliance. 

 Air Quality Alerts

• Today's air alerts
• General open burn forecast for metro Denver area
• Policy background:
  • Winter burns on the Front Range
  • Ozone alerts and prescribed fire  

Smoke weather ventilation patterns (658 Kb)

Photos of smoke at each ventilation adjective (5.9 Mb)