The impact of dynamic wind flow behavior on forest fire spread using cellular automata: Application to the watershed BOUKHALEF (Morocco)

Modeling the forest fire phenomena represents one of the most challenging and difficult problems, which need further investigations. Many research works have tackled this issue by developing simulation models in order to investigate the impact of climate change on fire spread behavior. In our previous work, a forest fire spread model has been introduced. The developed model takes into account some parameters that affect this phenomenon, such as topography, land use, nature and density of vegetation, humidity and wind by only considering uniform wind direction and speed. The work presented in this paper provides an improvement of this model for being integrated in real-sitting scenarios. In fact, a model of wind flow has been proposed. It is able to determine accurately the wind direction and speed according to the topography and land use. The proposed model was evaluated using dataset from a region in the north of Morocco, and results are reported to show the impact of the dynamic behavior of the wind on fire propagation.

Automated summary

Modeling the forest fire phenomena is a challenging problem that requires further investigation. Previous research has developed simulation models to study the impact of climate change on fire spread behavior. This paper presents an improved forest fire spread model that takes into account parameters such as topography, land use, vegetation, humidity, and wind. A new wind flow model is proposed to accurately determine wind direction and speed. The evaluation of the proposed model using data from the north of Morocco demonstrates the significant impact of wind dynamics on fire propagation.