Our simulations are designed to address questions such as: How does fire behavior depend on wind speed, vertical wind shear, and the vertical temperature profile? Do certain atmospheric conditions lead to blow-ups?

These experiments are usually done with 2-3 nested domains with about 20 m horizontal resolution in the finest domain, and a stretched vertical grid with resolution as fine as 10 m near the surface. This setup leads to an experiment with approximately 1 million gridpoints.

These animations of our model results were produced by NCAR's Scientific Computing Division's Visualization Group. See more fire model animations on their page at http://www.vets.ucar.edu/vg/categories/wildfires.shtml

Domain :1 km on a side. Wind: 3 m/s from rear near the ground, 3 m/s from ahead of the fire aloft. Buoyancy is volume rendered, the blue dots are tracer particles following the air motions, and give some idea where the fire might spot burning embers.

MPEG animation: 5.5 Mbytes

Wind: 3 m/s from the read near the ground. Expended fuel is shown on the terrain in brown, the buoyancy core at 2 degrees C in red, and the enstrophy (measure of total rotation) as a translucent surface in blue.

MPEG animation: 5 MBytes

AVI animation: 27 MBytes

This animation shows the buoyancy (red: 10 deg C), smoke (translucent white field), and winds near the fire (white arrows) as a fire travels up a hill before heat flux from the fire and its spread rate suddenly increase by a factor of 10.

MPEG animation: 6 MBytes

AVI animation: 17 MBytes