Wildfire Modeling with WRF ARW
including the WRF-Fire physics module
WRF-Fire
is a physics module within WRF ARW that allows us to model the
growth of a wildland fire in response to environmental conditions of
terrain slope, fuel characteristics, and atmospheric conditions, and
the dynamic feedbacks with the atmosphere. It is implemented as a
physics package with two-way coupling between the fire behavior and the
atmospheric environment allowing the latent and sensible heat released
by the fire to alter the atmosphere surrounding it, i.e. 'create its
own weather'. The modeling system is available for download at http://wrf-model.org.
The following animations show an example simulation I made using this model
to simulate a fire moving through tall grass (Anderson Fuel Model 3).
The fire starts as a 1 km long 40 m-wide line; constant easterly
winds of 2.5 m/s are driving
the fire from behind. The fuel is "tall grass", a typical fuel of
grass prairies. The misty field represents smoke, denser and
darker where the fire is burning
most intensely. The colors represent the senible heat flux, where
purple represents the largest heat fluxes decreasing to dark red, the
lowest shown in the image.
As the fire spreads, it evolves into an elliptical shape organized by
the fire itself with a heading region on the right, flanks on either
side, and a backing region to the left.
Animation -
click here for .avi
Animation - click here for .mov
The visualizations were produced with VAPOR
(www.vapor.ucar.edu), a product of the Computational Information
Systems Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The
surface image of a tall grass prairie originates from Landsat databases.
Keywords: wildfire models, fire behavior, forest fires, fire model, wildland fire model