A cellular automata model to link surface fires to firebrand lift-off and dispersal

Perryman, Holly A.; Dugaw, Christopher J.; Varner, J. Morgan; Johnson, Diane L.

doi:10.1071/wf11045

Cited by 23 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Accounting for long-range spotting has been shown to be important, and we are exploring the implementation of appropriate spotting models in WRF-Fire to reduce human intervention in the fire forecast process. Although literature on the topic is extensive [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38], it is still a challenge to realistically incorporate spotting phenomena in the models, while preserving computational efficiency required for operational purposes. The adequacy of spotting implementations needs to be systematically evaluated on wildland fires events where long-range spotting played a primary role in the fire spread, a good example of which is the Chimney Tops II fire.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A High Resolution Coupled Fire–Atmosphere Forecasting System to Minimize the Impacts of Wildland Fires: Applications to the Chimney Tops II Wildland Event

2018

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Wildland fires are responsible for large socio-economic impacts. Fires affect the environment, damage structures, threaten lives, cause health issues, and involve large suppression costs. These impacts can be mitigated via accurate fire spread forecast to inform the incident management team. We show that a fire forecast system based on a numerical weather prediction (NWP) model coupled with a wildland fire behavior model can provide this forecast. This was illustrated with the Chimney Tops II wildland fire responsible for large socio-economic impacts. The system was run at high horizontal resolution (111 m) over the region affected by the fire to provide a fine representation of the terrain and fuel heterogeneities and explicitly resolve atmospheric turbulence. Our findings suggest that one can use the high spatial resolution winds, fire spread and smoke forecast to minimize the adverse impacts of wildland fires.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A High Resolution Coupled Fire–Atmosphere Forecasting System to Minimize the Impacts of Wildland Fires: Applications to the Chimney Tops II Wildland Event

2018

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“…This convective and radiative transfer of heat causes a rapid ignition of the unburned fuel bed and leads to a faster spread of the fire. Turbulence can also facilitate the generation of spot fires when the firebrands are transported away from the main fire due to advection [26,27,28,29,30]. The effect of such random phenomena can range from subdued to catastrophic depending upon the concurrent weather conditions and fuel characteristics.…”

Section: Introduction and Motivationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Ref. [30], the authors integrate the mathematical models with a cellular automata scheme to demonstrate the variability in the landing patterns of firebrands. In Ref.…”

Section: Introduction and Motivationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turbulence and fire-spotting effects into wild-land fire simulators

Kaur

Mentrelli

Bosseur

et al. 2016

Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation

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This paper presents a mathematical approach to model the effects of phenomena with random nature such as turbulence and fire-spotting into the existing wildfire simulators. The formulation proposes that the propagation of the fire-front is the sum of a drifting component (obtained from an existing wildfire simulator without turbulence and fire-spotting) and a random fluctuating component. The modelling of the random effects is embodied in a probability density function accounting for the fluctuations around the fire perimeter which is given by the drifting component. In past, this formulation has been applied to include these random effects into a wildfire simulator based on an Eulerian moving interface method, namely the Level Set Method (LSM), but in this paper the same formulation is adapted for a wildfire simulator based on a Lagrangian front tracking technique, namely the Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS). The main highlight of the present study is the comparison of the performance of a Lagrangian and an Eulerian moving interface method when applied to wild-land fire propagation. Simple idealised numerical experiments are used to investigate the potential applicability of the proposed formulation to DEVS and to compare its behaviour with respect to the LSM. The results show that DEVS based wildfire propagation model qualitatively improves its performance (e.g., reproducing flank and back fire, increase in fire spread due to pre-heating of the fuel by hot air and firebrands, fire propagation across no fuel zones, secondary fire generation, \dots). Though the results presented here are devoid of any validation exercise and provide only a proof of concept, they show a strong inclination towards an intended operational use. The existing LSM or DEVS based operational simulators like WRF-SFIRE and ForeFire respectively can serve as an ideal basis for the same.Comment: Accepted for publication in Commun. Nonlinear Sci. Numer. Simula

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“…In a recent study, Martin and Hillen (2016) also discuss the underlying physical processes for firebrands in detail and they derive a landing distribution based on these physical processes. Besides these statistical approaches, few numerical models based on Large Eddy Simulation (LES) (Himoto and 25 Tanaka, 2005;Thurston et al, 2017;Tohidi and Kaye, 2017) or Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) (Wadhwani et al, 2017), small world networks , cellular automata models (Perryman et al, 2013) also exist in the literature. Bhutia et al (2010) present one such study based on coupled fire/atmosphere LES for predicting the short range fire-spotting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The continuing demand for the operational management tools is to provide a quick and efficient output with simple inputs but at the same time taking the most important parameters into consideration. Few operational fire spread models like FARSITE (Finney,35 (Andrews and Chase, 1989) and Prometheus (Tymstra et al, 2010) incorporate the phenomenon of fire-spotting through the Albini's model (Albini, 1979(Albini, , 1983. But Albini's model provides only an estimate of the maximum distance for a spot fire and does not include any function for the ignition probability to model the spread of spot fires.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Physical parametrisation of fire-spotting for operational fire spread models: response analysis with a model based on the Level Set Method

Kaur

Butenko

Pagnini

2018

Preprint

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Abstract. Fire-spotting is often responsible for a dangerous flare up in the wildfire and causes secondary ignitions isolated from the primary fire zone leading to perilous situations. In this paper a complete physical parametrisation of fire-spotting is presented within a formulation aimed to include random processes into operational fire spread models. This formulation can be implemented into existing operational models as a post-processing scheme at each time step, without calling for any major changes in the original framework. In particular, the efficacy of this formulation has already been shown for wildfire

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A cellular automata model to link surface fires to firebrand lift-off and dispersal

Cited by 23 publications

References 19 publications

A High Resolution Coupled Fire–Atmosphere Forecasting System to Minimize the Impacts of Wildland Fires: Applications to the Chimney Tops II Wildland Event

A High Resolution Coupled Fire–Atmosphere Forecasting System to Minimize the Impacts of Wildland Fires: Applications to the Chimney Tops II Wildland Event

Turbulence and fire-spotting effects into wild-land fire simulators

Physical parametrisation of fire-spotting for operational fire spread models: response analysis with a model based on the Level Set Method

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