Simulation of international crown fire modeling experiments using FIRETEC

This paper presents a series of numerical simulations of various burns from the International Crown Fire Modeling Experiment (ICFME). The ICFME was a joint Canada-US fire research project carried out between 1995 and 2001 near Fort Providence NWT (Stocks et al. 2004a, 2004b). The simulations are performed with a coupled atmospheric/fire behavior model, FIRETEC, reconstructed wind fields, and fuel bed using various levels of sophistication and detail. This series of FIRETEC simulations was performed in order to 1) validate FIRETEC for a variety of wind fields present during these experiments, 2) examine the implications of various fuel representations with FIRETEC. An important part of this series of simulations is the strong coupling between not only the fire but also the vegetation heterogeneity (due to the fuel breaks) and the surrounding winds. Predictions of the rates of spread, spread patterns, and other fire behavior characteristics are then compared to those observed for the experiments.