Evaluating wildfire simulators using historical fire data

Milne, George J.; Kelso, Joel; Murphy, M. E.; Mellor, Drew

doi:10.14195/978-989-26-0884-6_150

Cited by 1 publication

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References 10 publications

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“…Overall, modelling fire spread and behaviour is a complex task owing to a set of factors, including spatial and temporal heterogeneity in weather and fuels and fire suppression effects on fire propagation (Mutlu et al 2008;Alexander and Cruz 2013;Taylor et al 2013;Jahdi et al 2015). Several previous studies validated fire spread simulators by comparing simulated fire propagation against historical fire data (Perry 1998;Fujioka 2002;Arca et al 2007b;Filippi et al 2014;Milne et al 2014;Jahdi et al 2015). With regard to fuels, several studies have Table 5.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting wildfire spread and behaviour in Mediterranean landscapes

Salis

Arca

Alcasena

et al. 2016

Int. J. Wildland Fire

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The use of spatially explicit fire spread models to assess fire propagation and behaviour has several applications for fire management and research. We used the FARSITE simulator to predict the spread of a set of wildfires that occurred along an east–west gradient of the Euro-Mediterranean countries. The main purpose of this work was to evaluate the overall accuracy of the simulator and to quantify the effects of standard vs custom fuel models on fire simulation performance. We also analysed the effects of different fuel models and slope classes on the accuracy of FARSITE predictions. To run the simulations, several input layers describing each study area were acquired, and their effect on simulation outputs was analysed. Site-specific fuel models and canopy inputs were derived either from existing vegetation information and field sampling or through remote-sensing data. The custom fuel models produced an increase in simulation accuracy, and results were nearly unequivocal for all the case studies examined. We suggest that spatially explicit fire spread simulators and custom fuel models specifically developed for the heterogeneous landscapes of Mediterranean ecosystems can help improve fire hazard mapping and optimise fuel management practices across the Euro-Mediterranean region.

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