The Oregon Department of Forestry's smoke management section has developed two computer aids to calculate fuel consumption for the Oregon Smoke Management system. They are Automatic Calculation of Slash Tonnage (ACOST) and Pile Calculation of Slash Tonnage (PCOST). ACOST will calculate consumption on broadcast burns and PCOST calculates tonnage in piles. The programs are based on PNW research and basic equations used in Consume. The applications are available as spreadsheets, or as stand-alone programs on PCs.
Data requirements for ACOST include the acres of a unit to be burned, harvest date, snow-off month, ignition duration, percent slope, days since significant rainfall, wind speed, 10-hour fuel moisture, 1,000-hour fuel moisture, duff depth and fuel loading by size class. With these entries ACOST will calculate total tons consumed, tons per acre consumed, tons consumed by fuel size class and duff tons consumed.
PCOST uses pile shape codes found in the Oregon Smoke Management directive, pile dimensions, wood species, piles per acre and unit acres. The program uses this information to calculate tons per pile and unit total tons.
The applications may be used as planning aids. Information entered may be changed to show consumption under varied fuel moisture conditions. The ACOST spreadsheet accomodates at least ten individual units while the stand-alone version runs one unit at a time, PCOST can run a maximum of three pile types at once.
ACOST3.XLS - Excel spreadsheet version of ACOST
ACOST3.TXT - README file for the ACOST programs
PCOST2.XLS - Excel spreadsheet version of PCOST
Also available are:
For more information on ACOST or PCOST contact Nick Yonker at 503-945-7451.
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