A wildland fire modeling and visualization environment

We present an overview of a modeling environment, consisting of a coupled atmosphere-wildfire model, utilities for visualization, data processing, and diagnostics, open source software repositories, and a community wiki. The fire model is based on Rothermel's fire-spread formula, implemented by the level-set method, and coupled with WRF. This code extends WRF-Fire, distributed with WRF 3.3. In each time step, the fire module takes the wind as input and returns the latent and sensible heat fluxes. The software architecture uses WRF parallel infrastructure for massively parallel computing. We will report on large fine-scale simulations on thousands of cores. Recent features of the code include interpolation from an ideal logarithmic wind profile for nonhomogeneous fuels and ignition from a fire perimeter with a model spin-up. Real runs use online sources for fuel maps, fine-scale topography, and meteorological data. Visualization pathways allow generating images and animations in many packages, including VisTrails, VAPOR, MayaVi, and Paraview, as well as output to Google Earth. The environment is available from openwfm.org.