A review of wildland fire spread modelling, 1990-present 2: Empirical and quasi-empirical models

TL;DR

This paper reviews empirical and quasi-empirical models of wildland fire spread developed since 1990, focusing on statistical relationships between fire spread and environmental factors, highlighting advances enabled by GIS and remote sensing.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive critical review of empirical and quasi-empirical fire spread models, comparing different functional relationships and their development over the past three decades.

Findings

Wind speed and fuel moisture are key factors in fire spread models.

Different functional forms are used to relate environmental variables to fire spread rate.

Advances in spatial data analysis have enhanced modeling capabilities.

Abstract

In recent years, advances in computational power and spatial data analysis (GIS, remote sensing, etc) have led to an increase in attempts to model the spread and behaviour of wildland fires across the landscape. This series of review papers endeavours to critically and comprehensively review all types of surface fire spread models developed since 1990. This paper reviews models of an empirical or quasi-empirical nature. These models are based solely on the statistical analysis of experimentally obtained data with or without some physical framework for the basis of the relations. Other papers in the series review models of a physical or quasi-physical nature, and mathematical analogues and simulation models. The main relations of empirical models are that of wind speed and fuel moisture content with rate of forward spread. Comparisons are made of the different functional relationships selected by various authors for these variables.