Abstract:

The effect of large uncontrolled wildland fires on communities that lie in their way is devastating and more and more frequent. At the same time greater effort is being made to conduct prescribed fire burns in a way that reduces risk, but these require management tools. Many efforts are underway to understand and predict wildland fire behavior and spread in both the operational and research framework. I will present an abbreviated survey of some of the basic principles of fire spread in the wildland setting and research directions, with an emphasis on background material starting from simple idealized 1D heat equation models, bringing in observations where possible, and the work of various groups.  2D effects will be described, but fully coupled fire-atmosphere 3D GCM simulations are skipped to be able to introduce a statistical approach to ember-driven fire spread on the surface. The joint approach of physically constrained statistical models, with new field and laboratory experiments, is a potential way to help validate more sophisticated numerical simulation of these phenomena.