Percolation in real wildfires

Caldarelli, Guido; Frondoni, Raffaella; Gabrielli, Andrea; Montuori, M.; Retzlaff, Rebecca; Ricotta, Carlo

doi:10.1209/epl/i2001-00549-4

Cited by 50 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…We cannot support the conjecture of Caldarelli et al [12] that the DS-FFM is unable to produce realistic fire shapes. The overall performance of the DS-FFM in reproducing data of 68 fires in Alberta is surprisingly good in general, although it depends on the fire size class.…”

Section: Fire Shapes and The Ds-ffmcontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…Detailed studies of structural properties of real fire patterns are rare ( [6,12]). We use data obtained for 68 fires in boreal forest of Alberta that burnt without human intervention [13].…”

Section: Data and Structural Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The reason why Caldarelli et al [12] were not able to match output of the DS-FFM to their data might be that they used data of three large fires (58, 60, and 156 km , respectively). Hence all three fires are comparable to those of the largest size class in the data set of Eberhart and Woodard [13], for which the match between data and model output was also limited in our analysis of structural properties.…”

Section: Fire Shapes and The Ds-ffmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It would thus be desirable to test whether the DS-FFM reproduces further patterns observed in real forest-fire ecosystems [11]. Caldarelli et al [12] found that the DS-FFM was not able to reproduce fractal shapes in the clusters of three real forest fires in Italy. This seems to indicate that the DS-FFM has no ecological significance, but it might still be worthwhile to test the model with data from more than three fires and regarding a broader range of structural properties of burnt areas, the burn scars.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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More Realistic than Anticipated: A Classical Forest-Fire Model from Statistical Physics Captures Real Fire Shapes

Zinck¹,

Grimm²

2008

TOECOLJ

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Abstract:The quantitative study of wildfire data world wide revealed that wildfires exhibit power-law like frequencyarea distributions. Although models exist to predict the spread of a specific fire, there is as yet no agreement on the mechanism which drives wildfire systems on the landscape scale. A classical model in this context is the Drossel-Schwabl cellular automaton (DS-FFM) which robustly produces a power-law like frequency-area statistic for fire sizes. This model originated in statistical physics where it was used to illustrate the concept of self-organized criticality. A conjecture has been made in the literature that this model is not able to produce the spatial patterns of actual wildfires and hence is of no ecological significance. We test this conjecture by comparing the shape of simulated fires in the DS-FFM to those of 68 fires in the boreal forests of Alberta, Canada. Our results suggest that, contrary to the conjecture, the Drossel-Schwabl model performs well in producing realistic fire shapes. It can hence not be excluded as a candidate mechanism behind wildfire systems. We do show, however, that the performance depends on the size of the fire. Best results are obtained for fires of 400-2,000 ha. Very large fires of 2,000-20,000 ha and smaller fires of 20-200 ha differ from the simulated burn scars in the distribution and median size of islands of unburnt vegetation. Nevertheless, the overall fit remains good even for these size classes.

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Section: Fire Shapes and The Ds-ffmcontrasting

confidence: 99%

Section: Data and Structural Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Fire Shapes and The Ds-ffmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

More Realistic than Anticipated: A Classical Forest-Fire Model from Statistical Physics Captures Real Fire Shapes

Zinck¹,

Grimm²

2008

TOECOLJ

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“…Apart from general concerns that the DS-FFM apparently oversimplifies the complex nature of forest dynamics (Caldarelli et al, 2001), it significantly overestimates the frequency of large fires: since differences in the power-law exponent become more important as α comes close to one, the quantitative agreement between the DS-FFM (1.0≤α≤1.25) and nature (1.1≤α≤1.9) is in fact rather weak: the cumulative distribution P (s) decays like s −(α−1) (Hergarten, 2002), and thus changes strongly if α tends to one. To overcome this problem is not trivial because a systematic variation of the power-law exponent α is not provided by the model.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cellular automaton modelling of lightning-induced and man made forest fires

Krenn

Hergarten

2009

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. The impact of forest fires on nature and civilisation is conflicting: on one hand, they play an irreplaceable role in the natural regeneration process, but on the other hand, they come within the major natural hazards in many regions. Their frequency-area distributions show power-law behaviour with scaling exponents α in a quite narrow range, relating wildfire research to the theoretical framework of self-organised criticality. Examples of self-organised critical behaviour can be found in computer simulations of simple cellular automaton models. The established self-organised critical Drossel-Schwabl forest fire model is one of the most widespread models in this context. Despite its qualitative agreement with event-size statistics from nature, its applicability is still questioned. Apart from general concerns that the Drossel-Schwabl model apparently oversimplifies the complex nature of forest dynamics, it significantly overestimates the frequency of large fires. We present a modification of the model rules that distinguishes between lightning-induced and man made forest fires and enables a systematic increase of the scaling exponent α by approximately 1/3. In addition, combined simulations using both the original and the modified model rules predict a dependence of the overall event-size distribution on the ratio of lightning induced and man made fires as well as a splitting of their partial distributions. Lightning is identified as the dominant mechanism in the regime of the largest fires. The results are confirmed by the analysis of the Canadian Large Fire Database and suggest that lightning-induced and man made forest fires cannot be treated separately in wildfire modelling, hazard assessment and forest management.

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Flow, Transport, and Reaction in Porous Media: Percolation Scaling, Critical‐Path Analysis, and Effective Medium Approximation

Hunt

Sahimi

2017

Reviews of Geophysics

141

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We describe the most important developments in the application of three theoretical tools to modeling of the morphology of porous media and flow and transport processes in them. One tool is percolation theory. Although it was over 40 years ago that the possibility of using percolation theory to describe flow and transport processes in porous media was first raised, new models and concepts, as well as new variants of the original percolation model are still being developed for various applications to flow phenomena in porous media. The other two approaches, closely related to percolation theory, are the critical‐path analysis, which is applicable when porous media are highly heterogeneous, and the effective medium approximation—poor man's percolation—that provide a simple and, under certain conditions, quantitatively correct description of transport in porous media in which percolation‐type disorder is relevant. Applications to topics in geosciences include predictions of the hydraulic conductivity and air permeability, solute and gas diffusion that are particularly important in ecohydrological applications and land‐surface interactions, and multiphase flow in porous media, as well as non‐Gaussian solute transport, and flow morphologies associated with imbibition into unsaturated fractures. We describe new applications of percolation theory of solute transport to chemical weathering and soil formation, geomorphology, and elemental cycling through the terrestrial Earth surface. Wherever quantitatively accurate predictions of such quantities are relevant, so are the techniques presented here. Whenever possible, the theoretical predictions are compared with the relevant experimental data. In practically all the cases, the agreement between the theoretical predictions and the data is excellent. Also discussed are possible future directions in the application of such concepts to many other phenomena in geosciences.

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Percolation in real wildfires

Cited by 50 publications

References 23 publications

More Realistic than Anticipated: A Classical Forest-Fire Model from Statistical Physics Captures Real Fire Shapes

More Realistic than Anticipated: A Classical Forest-Fire Model from Statistical Physics Captures Real Fire Shapes

Cellular automaton modelling of lightning-induced and man made forest fires

Flow, Transport, and Reaction in Porous Media: Percolation Scaling, Critical‐Path Analysis, and Effective Medium Approximation

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