[1] Drought provides a favourable environment for the ignition and spread of intense wildfires. This study examines the opposite relationship between the two natural disasters, that is, the role of wildfires in the development of drought. The case of the 1988 northern U.S. wildfires is investigated. Emissions of smoke particles from the wildfires and the resulting optical depth are estimated us...

Dynamic data driven simulation dynamically assimilates observation data at runtime to improve the simulation results. Typically, the observations are “hard data” that are data collected from sensors. In this paper we consider dynamic data driven simulation with soft data, which are data coming from human reports. Compared with the quantified hard data, soft data are qualitative, fuzzy and subje...

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org F 60 years, Smokey Bear has successfully championed fire suppression in the United States, but his success has come at considerable cost. Indeed, it could be likened to the British victory over American rebels at Bunker Hill in 1775, about which it was said, “A few more such victories would surely spell ruin for the victors”. We exa...

To study how fire or herbicide use influences longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) overstory and understory vegetation, five treatments were initiated in a 5–6-year-old longleaf pine stand: check, biennial arborescent plant control by directed herbicide application, and biennial burning inMarch,May, or July. The herbicide or prescribed fire treatments were applied in 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005...

DEVS-FIRE is a cellular space model for simulating wildfire spread based on the DEVS formalism. To apply parallel simulation of the DEVS-FIRE model, we need a way to divide the simulation tasks and assign them to multiple parallel processing nodes. One way to divide the simulation tasks is based on the spatial partition of the cellular space model. Two spatial partition ideas, i.e., a uniform p...

Geographic dynamics refers to the development of processes that shape our environment. While geographic dynamics is central to geographic understanding, the current GIS technology is incapable of capturing information that reflects the working of geographic processes, such as spread of a wildfire, development of a weather system, and propagation of a disease. Inability to represent geographic d...

Challenges associated with the allocation of limited resources to mitigate the impact of natural disasters inspire fundamentally new theoretical questions for dynamic decision making in coupled human and natural systems. Wildfires are one of several types of disaster phenomena, including oil spills and disease epidemics, where (1) the disaster evolves on the same timescale as the response effor...

A series of fire experiments were carried out in a wind tunnel at the United States Forest Service’s Fire Science Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. The experiments involved tines cut out of pieces of cardboard. The pieces were laid out in comb-like strips parallel to each other along a testbed. They were ignited at the windward end of the testbed. The progress of the fire was monitored by thermo...

Forest fire risk assessment is an important task for forest fire management and planning. This paper presents current work on the definition and implementation of forest fire risk assessment models in the Wildfire Analyst TM software with the purpose of providing support and increased value in risk assessment. Three models are presented based on the concept of forest fire risk: forest fire stru...

Worldwide, the preponderance and severity of wildfires is increasing due to a number of factors, among them changes in temperature and precipitation patterns consistent with climate change. Aside from the acute threat of imminent death, wildfires expose people to a range of harmful pollutants in smoke. Although health effects are well documented for many of these individual pollutants— includin...