Data management and analysis with WRF and SFIRE

TL;DR

This paper presents new utilities and tools for creating, analyzing, and visualizing wildland fire simulations using WRF and SFIRE, integrating data preprocessing, domain setup, 3D exploration, and output visualization.

Contribution

Introduction of standalone utilities and scripts that streamline data acquisition, domain setup, visualization, and integration with web and 3D tools for wildland fire modeling.

Findings

Automated data downloading and preprocessing from common sources.

Simplified domain setup with automatic parameter file creation.

Enhanced visualization with 3D exploration and high-quality renderings.

Abstract

We introduce several useful utilities in development for the creation and analysis of real wildland fire simulations using WRF and SFIRE. These utilities exist as standalone programs and scripts as well as extensions to other well known software. Python web scrapers automate the process of downloading and preprocessing atmospheric and surface data from common sources. Other scripts simplify the domain setup by creating parameter files automatically. Integration with Google Earth allows users to explore the simulation in a 3D environment along with real surface imagery. Postprocessing scripts provide the user with a number of output data formats compatible with many commonly used visualization suites allowing for the creation of high quality 3D renderings. As a whole, these improvements build toward a unified web application that brings a sophisticated wildland fire modeling environment to scientists and users alike.