About Us

The Fire & Exceptional Event Assessment, Screening, and Toolkit (FEAST) is a collaborative initiative between the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the Desert Research Institute (DRI). FEAST’s mission is to provide science-based, transparent, and accessible tools that help balance the ecological benefits of prescribed fire with California’s air quality goals.

FEAST supports the responsible use of prescribed fire in California — a vital land management practice used to reduce hazardous fuels, restore ecological balance, and prevent catastrophic wildfires. Prescribed fires are carefully planned and intentionally ignited by trained professionals under specific conditions to achieve ecological and safety goals.

As climate change intensifies wildfire risks across the state, prescribed fire has become an increasingly essential tool for reducing wildfire severity, improving forest health, protecting communities, and preserving biodiversity. At the same time, wildfires continue to pose significant threats, contributing to severe air quality impacts and public health concerns.

While prescribed burns bring environmental and safety benefits, they can also cause short-term air quality impacts. These impacts must be carefully managed to protect public health and ensure compliance with federal air quality standards.

FEAST was developed to help land managers, air districts, state agencies, and communities navigate the complex intersection of prescribed fire, wildfire, and air quality. It provides a centralized platform for accessing, analyzing, and visualizing data related to fire activity and its air quality effects — helping users make informed, science-based decisions.

By enhancing access to data and analytical tools, FEAST supports the use of prescribed fire in ways that balance ecological benefits with clean-air protection and community well-being.

This work also supports compliance with the latest federal PM₂₅ standard, which lowered the annual limit from 12 µg/m³ to 9 µg/m³.

Provisional Data Disclaimer: All data and analyses presented through FEAST are provisional and subject to revision as sensor maintenance, calibration updates, or algorithm refinements occur. Users should account for these updates when interpreting results or applying FEAST information to regulatory or planning decisions.

What FEAST Offers

FEAST brings together a suite of interactive tools and visualizations that help users explore the relationships among prescribed fire, wildfire, and air quality — from statewide trends to site-specific analyses.

FEAST provides three core features designed to support the responsible expansion of prescribed fire use and help maintain compliance with air quality standards, including:

1) Exceptional Event Toolkits

FEAST offers a suite of interactive tools designed to support compliance with air quality standards by helping users evaluate and document PM₂₅ exceedances. These tools include:

a) Annual and 24-Hour Design Value Maps

These maps display annual and 24-hour PM₂₅ design values across California covering data from 2012 onward. Users can explore how design values have changed over time and across regions, helping to identify long-term trends and areas of concern.

b) PM2.5 Tile Plot

This tool visualizes daily PM₂₅ concentrations for a selected location and time range. Each tile on the calendar represents a single day of the year and is color-coded based on PM₂₅ concentration tiers, making it easy to spot exceedance patterns and seasonal trends.

c) Fire Timeline Tool

The Fire Timeline Tool helps identify potential wildfire and prescribed fire events that may have contributed to PM₂₅ exceedances at a specific monitoring site. Using proximity-based analysis, the tool highlights exceedance days and summarizes nearby fire activity:

  • 🔥 Prescribed fires within 50 miles
  • 🔥 Wildfires within 100 miles

This tool supports exceptional event demonstrations by helping users assess whether nearby fire activity may have influenced a site's design value.

d) Template Generator

This feature streamlines the creation of Exceptional Event demonstration templates by automatically generating key content—such as images, tables, design value calculations, and other essential elements—based on user input. It significantly reduces the time and effort required to prepare documentation.

The template is modeled after the U.S. EPA’s Prescribed Fire Exceptional Events Demonstration – Particulate Matter, Nevada County, CA ( https://www.epa.gov/air-quality-analysis/exceptional-events-documents-particulate-matter-nevada-county-ca) and is generated using user-provided information, including the AQS Site ID, exceedance date, target design value year, prescribed fire agency, and details of the prescribed fires.

Users can download the generated .docx file and customize the content as needed—eliminating the need to manually create charts, visuals, and formatted documentation from scratch.

2) Daily Exceedance Reports

Each day, FEAST identifies PM₂₅ and ozone exceedances based on daily air quality standards (PM₂₅ ≥ 35 µg/m³, ozone ≥ 70 ppb) and generates a preliminary report when an exceedance occurs. These reports provide an initial assessment through interactive maps and time-series graphics, allowing users to compare exceedances with climatological trends and evaluate whether nearby prescribed fires or wildfires may have contributed—based on both spatial proximity and air parcel movement.

Note: These assessments are preliminary and intended for informational and screening purposes only.

3) Integrated Data Visualizations

FEAST provides interactive map visualizations and statistical analyses to help users explore prescribed fires, wildfires, and air quality exceedances across California.

a) Prescribed Fire Viewer

FEAST offers one of the most comprehensive prescribed fire datasets available in California, compiled from the Prescribed Fire Information Reporting System (PFIRS) and integrated with air quality and meteorological information derived from both observational datasets and numerical modeling outputs. Together, these datasets deliver a robust, data-driven understanding of how prescribed fire activity interacts with meteorological conditions to influence air quality patterns.

Each prescribed fire record includes:

i) Prescribed Fire Information

Detailed burn data reported by burners, including location, burn type, burn unit, and acreage, as recorded in PFIRS.

ii) Satellite and Fire Detection Imagery

High-resolution geospatial imagery captured every six minutes, featuring true-color and fire-temperature satellite images. These are combined with Hazard Mapping System (HMS) fire detections and smoke plume boundaries, centered on the prescribed fire for enhanced spatial context.

iii) AirNow Monitoring Data

Hourly PM2.5 and ozone concentrations from AirNow monitors within a 40-mile radius of the prescribed fire, covering two days before and after each burn.

iv) PurpleAir Sensor Data

Hourly PM2.5 data from PurpleAir sensors within a 20-mile radius, offering greater spatial coverage and detailed air quality trends over the same time window as AirNow.

v) Meteorological Observations

Hourly surface meteorological measurements from multiple sources within California, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Remote Automatic Weather Stations (RAWS), California Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS), Aerometric Information Retrieval System (AIRS), and the National Data Buoy Center (Buoy). Parameters include wind direction and speed, wind rose diagrams, relative humidity, temperature, and precipitation—display within a 40-mile radius of the fire area.

vi) BlueSky Smoke Modeling

Forecasted smoke dispersion patterns are generated using the BlueSky modeling system operated by DRI, supporting both pre-burn planning and post-event evaluation.

vii) CANSAC Meteorological Forecasts

Seven essential meteorological variables are derived from high-resolution outputs of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, operated by the California and Nevada Smoke and Air Committee (CANSAC) at DRI.

  • 500 hPa geopotential height
  • Surface relative humidity
  • Planetary boundary layer height
  • Surface winds
  • Transport winds
  • Temperature
  • Ventilation index

These data are also highly valuable for both pre-burn planning and post-event evaluation.


b) Wildfire Viewer

While prescribed fire data highlight planned, beneficial burns, the Wildfire Viewer provides crucial context for understanding uncontrolled fire events and their cumulative impacts on air quality. FEAST includes a Wildfire View that allows users to explore wildfire activity covering data from 2021 to today.

This interactive visualization leverages wildfire perimeter data from CAL FIRE’s Fire Resource and Assessment Program (FRAP) to display fire locations, boundaries, and their proximity to nearby communities. Users can select specific dates of interest to better understand the scope, distribution, and community impacts of wildfire events across California.


c) Exceedance Viewer

FEAST offers a powerful suite of tools to help users explore and understand PM₂₅ and ozone exceedances across California. Whether you're screening data, analyzing trends, or evaluating potential exceptional events, FEAST provides a comprehensive, user-friendly framework to support informed, data-driven decisions.

These tools include:

i) Daily Exceedance Reports

As described in the second feature section, these reports identify exceedances based on daily air quality standards and provide preliminary assessments using climatological trends, spatial proximity, and air parcel trajectories.

ii) Historical Exceedance Summary Table

Building on the daily reports, the Historical Exceedance Summary Table allows users to explore exceedance data by day, month, or year. This visualization illustrates how exceedance frequency changes across different time scales.

iii) PM₂₅ and Ozone Design Value Estimator

The PM₂₅ and Ozone Design Value Estimator is designed to support air quality analysts in evaluating how individual high-pollution days may influence a site’s design value. By allowing users to simulate the removal of days that exceed a specified threshold, the tool provides valuable insight into the role of specific days in design value calculations and attainment assessments.


d) Satellite Viewer

FEAST features an interactive viewer that displays 6-minute Truecolor satellite imagery overlaid with HMS fire detections and smoke plume boundaries across California. These high-resolution images are among the most effective tools for monitoring smoke dispersion from prescribed fires and wildfires, particularly when cloud cover is minimal.

Users can select specific dates and time intervals to explore daily satellite imagery and use the built-in time slider to visualize smoke movement throughout the day. This tool enhances the ability to assess smoke transport and supports exceptional event analysis.

FEAST continues to expand through ongoing collaboration between CARB and DRI, providing up-to-date data and analytical tools that strengthen prescribed fire planning, exceptional event assessments, and statewide air quality management.

Explore FEAST’s tools to better understand how prescribed fire, wildfire, and air quality intersect across California.