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Abstract. This work represents the first step toward a DDDAS for Wildland Fire Prediction where our main efforts are oriented to take advantage of the computing power provided by High Performance Computing systems to, on the one hand, propose computational data driven steering strategies to overcome input data uncertainty and, on the other hand, to reduce the execution time of the whole prediction process in order to be reliable during real-time crisis. In particular, this work is focused on the description of a Dynamic Data Driven Genetic Algorithm used as steering strategy to automatic adjust certain input data values of forest fire simulators taking into account the underlying propagation model and the real fire behavior.

Wildfires are a major concern in Argentinian northwestern Patagonia and in many ecosystems and human societies around the world. We developed an efficient cellular automata model in Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to simulate fire propagation. The graphical advantages of GPUs were exploited by overlapping wind direction, as well as vegetation, slope, and aspect maps, taking into account relevant landscape characteristics for fire propagation. Stochastic propagation was performed with a probability model that depends on aspect, slope, wind direction and vegetation type. Implementing a genetic algorithm search strategy we show, using simulated fires, that we recover the five parameter values that characterize fire propagation. The efficiency of the fire simulation procedure allowed us to also estimate the fire ignition point when it is unknown as well as its associated uncertainty, making this approach suitable for the analysis of fire spread based on maps of burnt areas without knowing the point of origin of the fires or how they spread.

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