Wildfire forecasting bill led by New Mexico Senator gets unanimous Senate passage

Legislation to improve wildfire forecasting enjoyed unanimous passage in the U.S. Senate last week — a show of bipartisan support for expanding the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research.

Even as the Trump administration underspends NOAA’s budget in the current fiscal year, the Senate passed bills to expand the agency’s fire forecasting and advanced ocean mapping.

The Fire Ready Nation Act was one of several bills connected to the environment and public safety that passed through the Senate unanimously, bringing them a step closer to becoming law. With eight sponsors, the bill had bipartisan support, including from Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

“With wildfires impacting communities across the country, it is clear we must do more to better forecast, prevent, and fight wildfires to save lives and livelihoods,” Luján said in a statement. “In the Senate, many senators — both Democrats and Republicans — have seen firsthand the impact wildfires can have on our states.”

The legislation would establish a fire weather services program to authorize wildfire response services at NOAA, create a fire weather test bed for research on new technologies, including on using drones for fire data collection, and share NOAA data across multiple federal agencies. It would also codify the Incident Meteorologist Service into law. Incident Meteorologist Service forecasters are deployed to assist emergency responders.

University of New Mexico professor and Director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society Matt Hurteau thinks the bill could be useful.

“Spending some money to better understand and predict the wildfire environment is going to end up allowing us to manage the risk that these big wildfires pose to society in a much more effective manner,” Hurteau said.

From 2019 to 2023, the federal government on average spent close to $3 billion a year suppressing fires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

The bill would authorize $148 million over the next five years for NOAA to accomplish its expanded fire weather duties, but Congress would still have to appropriate those funding levels to NOAA to support the program.

Plume-dominated fires, where the fire’s behavior is mainly controlled by wind generated by its own plume, are more common in western forests where conditions are drier than in other parts of the country.

Those types of fires are harder to predict, Hurteau said. Research into modern modeling techniques and how machine learning and artificial intelligence could help with fire forecasting — things the bill could make space for at NOAA — may help.

The bill also supports getting better information on smoke forecasting, Hurteau said, which could help address some of the health effects that come from wildfires.

“NOAA is a world leader in wildfire forecasting and already plays a major role in wildfire preparedness and response,” Luján said. “Any efforts to divert or underspend NOAA funds put our communities in danger. If my Fire Ready Nation Act passes the House, I urge the president to sign it into law given the strong bipartisan support it has received and the unmistakable need to boost our ability to better forecast, prevent, and fight wildfires.”