Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WILDLAND FIRE
Volume 18, Issue 1, Pages 50-60Publisher
CSIRO PUBLISHING
DOI: 10.1071/WF07072
Keywords
atmospheric boundary layer; coupled atmosphere-wildfire numerical model; fire-induced convection; grassland fire; probabilistic wildfire prediction; rate of fire spread
Categories
Funding
- United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service Research Joint Venture [03-JV-1123130008]
- Center for High Performance Computing
- University of Utah
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The major source of uncertainty in wildfire behavior prediction is the transient behavior of wildfire due to changes in flow in the fire's environment. The changes in flow are dominated by two factors. The first is the interaction or 'coupling' between the fire and the fire-induced flow. The second is the interaction or 'coupling' between the fire and the ambient flow driven by turbulence due to wind gustiness and eddies in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). In the present study, coupled wildfire-atmosphere large-eddy simulations of grassland fires are used to examine the differences in the rate of spread and area burnt by grass fires in two types of ABL, a buoyancy-dominated ABL and a roll-dominated ABL. The simulations show how a buoyancy-dominated ABL affects fire spread, how a roll-dominated ABL affects fire spread, and how fire lines interact with these two different ABL flow types. The simulations also show how important are fire-atmosphere couplings or fire-induced circulations to fire line spread compared with the direct impact of the turbulence in the two different ABLs. The results have implications for operational wildfire behavior prediction. Ultimately, it will be important to use techniques that include an estimate of uncertainty in wildfire behavior forecasts.
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