About 8 million acres of forest, range, and crop land are burned annually in the southern United States, mostly for hazard reduction, wildlife habitat improvement, and range management. Georgia is one of the states strongly affected by prescribed fires. Unlike wildfires, which fall into the category of natural events, prescribed fire induced high particulate matter conditions above the national ambient air quality standards are usually considered as nonattainment events. Therefore, prescribed fires are actively regulated and managed in part for air quality considerations. In Georgia, burning permits must be issued by the Georgia Forestry Commission (GFC) before prescribed burning occurs. However, there is currently no quantitative air quality forecasting for prescribed fires, and the issuing of burning permits is mostly based on meteorological forecasts. Similarly air quality forecasts for prescribed fire impact needs to be included as part of the state air quality forecasts. The forecasts for prescribed fires will also help exceptional event identification and enable more public inspection of prescribed burning. We propose a three-tiered air quality forecast system for prescribed fires in this project. Building on the NOAA NAQFC air quality forecasts, we will develop (1) an automated system of air quality forecasts which include prescribed fire emissions in the previous days, (2) more realistic prescribed fire emission inventories based on satellite observations and burning permit data; and (3) quantitative assessments of air quality impact for requested burning permits. The hypotheses to be tested are that (1) quantitative impact forecasts will improve prescribed fire management; (2) satellite burned area products do not adequately represent occurrences of understory prescribed fires; (3) satellite active fire products underestimate emissions from prescribed fire emissions because of low burning temperature and canopy shielding effect; and (4) by combining burning permit data with satellite active fire products and top-down fire emission inventories, adjustments can be made to significantly improve the prescribed fire emission estimates. We will work with regional organizations and the NOAA NAQFC team to make the system we will develop in this project broadly available to other states and agencies, for whom prescribed fires are a significant factor in their decision-making activities.