Coupled atmosphere-wildland fire modeling with WRF-Fire

TL;DR

This paper introduces WRF-Fire, a coupled atmosphere-wildland fire model that integrates fire spread simulation with weather forecasting, enabling dynamic interaction between fire behavior and atmospheric conditions.

Contribution

It presents a novel coupled modeling framework combining a level-set fire spread model with the WRF weather model, including implementation details and software structure.

Findings

Coupled model simulates fire-atmosphere interactions dynamically.

Uses level-set method for flexible fire region representation.

Distributed as part of WRF for parallel computing efficiency.

Abstract

We describe the physical model, numerical algorithms, and software structure of WRF-Fire. WRF-Fire consists of a fire-spread model, implemented by the level-set method, coupled with the Weather Research and Forecasting model. In every time step, the fire model inputs the surface wind, which drives the fire, and outputs the heat flux from the fire into the atmosphere, which in turn influences the atmosphere. The level-set method allows submesh representation of the burning region and flexible implementation of various ignition modes. WRF-Fire is distributed as a part of WRF and it uses the WRF parallel infrastructure for parallel computing.