7.5 Applying FIRETEC to real world wildfire scenarios

Wednesday, 24 October 2007: 12:00 AM
The Turrets (Atlantic Oakes Resort)
Judith Winterkamp, LANL, Los Alamos, NM; and R. R. Linn, W. S. Smith, S. P. Brumby, and J. A. Sauer

FIRETEC, a three-dimensional coupled fire/atmosphere computer model, is being used to investigate a variety of aspects of wildfire behaviour. In many of these investigations idealized topography, wind conditions, and/or fuel beds are used to initialize and bound the simulations in order to isolate specific features of coupled fire/atmosphere or coupled fire/atmosphere/topography behaviour. Other applications of FIRETEC require a combination of fuel beds, topography, and atmospheric conditions that more closely resemble real world historical or postulated fires. These applications include risk assessment, forecasting impacts of specific thinning treatments, using the model to recreate and study historical fires, and validation of the model. Applying physics-based models such as FIRETEC to real-world situations pose a variety of challenges since this type of model can accept/requires significantly more vegetation and atmospheric data than most operational models. Typical questions that must be answered include: What is the nature of the fuel load, distribution and inhomogeneities? How do the local topography-influenced winds evolve with time? What is the nature of the wind fluctuations – frequency, strength, and spatial scale? Capturing realistic initial and boundary conditions of these sorts is usually difficult because they involve information that is often not measured for operational models and in many cases is not measured at all. Various approaches have been used to understand the possible significance of unknown conditions. Other approaches have now been adopted to make the leap from existing data to the full data set that is needed for detailed physics-based simulations.
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