A Wildland Fire Physical Model Well Suited to Data Assimilation

Abstract

In this article, we focus on a simplified two-dimensional fire model with some three-dimensional effects. The model takes into account the moisture content and the energy lost in the vertical direction and to radiation from the flames. We couple this model with a local wind model, well adapted to fire modelling. The topography, fuel type, mass fraction of the fuel and the meteorological data required by the model (temperature, humidity and wind) are provided by geographic information systems. We incorporate data assimilation techniques to our fire model in order to improve the approximations obtained with the model. The data assimilated are the temperature of the solid fuel (which is related to the position of the fire front) and the mass fraction of fuel at certain points in the domain. The numerical examples show that this procedure is able to correct the approximations obtained by the model simulations, providing more realistic predictions. The process is implemented using parallel computing.