14
July 2008: An International Workshop on Advances in Operational Weather Systems
for Fire Danger Rating, organized jointly by World Meteorological Organization
(WMO), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Panel for Global Observation
of Forest and Land Cover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD), and Natural Resources Canada’s
Canadian Forest Service, in collaboration with a number of other co-sponsors, is
being held from 14-16 July 2008, in Edmonton, Canada.

Workshop
participants are expected to review operational and prototype weather-based
Fire Danger Rating systems from around the globe. The workshop will further focus
on weather observations and networks, data management, weather analyses,
approaches to defining and evaluating fire danger levels, additional indices of
fire danger and smoke forecasting and monitoring. “Over the years WMO, with
partners, has been developing tools to evaluate and predict the effects of
weather and climate on fires and their potential. Our target is to produce
operational guidelines for fire weather agrometeorology by 2009,”
Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement delivered on his behalf.
The three-day workshop will be followed by a two-day meeting of the WMO
Commission for Agricultural Meteorology Expert Team on Agrometeorology for
Sustainable Development. [Workshop
website]