Streamlined wildland-urban interface fire tracing (SWUIFT): Modeling wildfire spread in communities

Masoudvaziri, Nima; Bardales, Fernando Szasdi; Keskin, Oguz Kaan; Sarreshtehdari, Amir; Sun, Kang; Khorasani, Negar Elhami

doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2021.105097

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…As an additional step, more complex models (i.e., with full representation of combustion processes) combined with machine learning could be leveraged to improve fire spread parameterizations within coupled fire‐atmosphere models. Lastly, we highlight that urban models (e.g., Masoudvaziri et al., 2021) are currently being used to help inform WUI fire spread, with emerging graphics processing unit‐accelerated LES methods (e.g., Sauer & Muñoz‐Esparza, 2020) becoming increasingly attractive platforms. The WUI challenge highlights the urgent need to better understand the complex interactions between humans and the built environment, weather, and wildfire, and ultimately develop more effective solutions to predict wildfire behavior and risk.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Better Understanding of Wildfire Behavior in the Wildland‐Urban Interface: A Case Study of the 2021 Marshall Fire

Juliano

Lareau

Frediani

et al. 2023

Geophysical Research Letters

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Better Understanding of Wildfire Behavior in the Wildland‐Urban Interface: A Case Study of the 2021 Marshall Fire

Juliano

Lareau

Frediani

et al. 2023

Geophysical Research Letters

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“…We are making significant advances in capturing the impacts of fire on winds during an event (164) as well as on local weather conditions (168,169), which both have the capacity to alter fire behavior and path. Advances in analytical approaches are making it possible to model community vulnerability (170) and risk (171) from a fire propagation perspective while accounting for the interaction between structures (172). However, to date, we do not have consensus on a model to assess the survivability of individual structures from wildfire events, as available urban fire spread models are not designed for these communities and underestimate the fire spread rate in most cases (172).…”

Section: : Challenge: Develop Coupled Models That Include Human Dimen...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Advances in analytical approaches are making it possible to model community vulnerability (170) and risk (171) from a fire propagation perspective while accounting for the interaction between structures (172). However, to date, we do not have consensus on a model to assess the survivability of individual structures from wildfire events, as available urban fire spread models are not designed for these communities and underestimate the fire spread rate in most cases (172). Developing such models is vital for determining how to manage wildfire risk at the community level.…”

Section: : Challenge: Develop Coupled Models That Include Human Dimen...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reimagine fire science for the anthropocene

et al. 2022

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Fire is an integral component of ecosystems globally and a tool that humans have harnessed for millennia. Altered fire regimes are a fundamental cause and consequence of global change, impacting people and the biophysical systems on which they depend. As part of the newly emerging Anthropocene, marked by human-caused climate change and radical changes to ecosystems, fire danger is increasing, and fires are having increasingly devastating impacts on human health, infrastructure, and ecosystem services. Increasing fire danger is a vexing problem that requires deep transdisciplinary, trans-sector, and inclusive partnerships to address. Here, we outline barriers and opportunities in the next generation of fire science and provide guidance for investment in future research. We synthesize insights needed to better address the long-standing challenges of innovation across disciplines to (i) promote coordinated research efforts; (ii) embrace different ways of knowing and knowledge generation; (iii) promote exploration of fundamental science; (iv) capitalize on the “firehose” of data for societal benefit; and (v) integrate human and natural systems into models across multiple scales. Fire science is thus at a critical transitional moment. We need to shift from observation and modeled representations of varying components of climate, people, vegetation, and fire to more integrative and predictive approaches that support pathways towards mitigating and adapting to our increasingly flammable world, including the utilization of fire for human safety and benefit. Only through overcoming institutional silos and accessing knowledge across diverse communities can we effectively undertake research that improves outcomes in our more fiery future.

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“…The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the geographic area where anthropogenic urban land use and wildland vegetation come into contact or intermingle (e.g. chAs-Amil et al 2013, Modugno et al 2016, Masoudvaziri et al 2021. The technical definition of WUI has not been unequivocally determined (Stewart et al 2009, Mell et al 2010, Platt 2010 Intermix refers to areas with ⩾6.18 houses per km 2 and ⩾50% cover of wildland vegetation; while Interface refers to areas with ⩾6.18 houses per km 2 and <50% cover of vegetation located <2.4 km from an area ⩾5 km 2 in size that is ⩾75% vegetated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global expansion of wildland-urban interface (WUI) and WUI fires: insights from a multiyear worldwide unified database (WUWUI)

Tang,

He,

Emmons

et al. 2024

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Fires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are an important issue globally. To understand the change of WUI, we develop a 9-km Worldwide Unified Wildland-Urban Interface (WUWUI) database for 2001-2020 with Random Forest models and satellite data. We find that WUI has been increasing in all populated continents from 2001 to 2020 and the global relative increase is 24%, with the largest relative increase (~59%) over Africa. Global total fire counts decrease by 10% from 2005 to 2020, whereas the WUI fraction of fire counts increases by 23%. The global total burned area decreases by 22% from 2005 to 2020, whereas the WUI fraction of burned area increases by 35%. These are mainly due to the expansion of WUI area. On all the populated continents, the WUI fractions of fire counts are higher than the WUI fractions of burned area, implying that WUI fires tend to have smaller sizes than wildland fires. We also project future WUI changes for the years 2030 and 2040, together with the projection of future fire burned area under different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenarios in the Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2). The projected global WUI fraction (excluding Antarctica and the oceans) is 5.9% in 2040 compared to 4.8% in 2020.The global WUI fraction of burned area is projected to increase from now to 2040 under most scenarios analyzed in this study, unless the WUI area stays at the 2020 level together with the projected burned area under SSP4-4.5. This study is a first step to understanding the changes of WUI fires at the global scale and demonstrates a growing importance of WUI fires. The global multi-year WUI and WUI fire datasets developed in this study can facilitate future work quantifying the impacts of WUI fires on air quality and climate. 

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Streamlined wildland-urban interface fire tracing (SWUIFT): Modeling wildfire spread in communities

Cited by 17 publications

References 57 publications

Toward a Better Understanding of Wildfire Behavior in the Wildland‐Urban Interface: A Case Study of the 2021 Marshall Fire

Toward a Better Understanding of Wildfire Behavior in the Wildland‐Urban Interface: A Case Study of the 2021 Marshall Fire

Reimagine fire science for the anthropocene

Global expansion of wildland-urban interface (WUI) and WUI fires: insights from a multiyear worldwide unified database (WUWUI)

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