Assimilating real time sensor into a running simulation model can improve simulation results for simulating large-scale spatial temporal systems such as wildfire, road traffic and flood. Particle filters are important methods to support data assimilation. While particle filters can work effectively with sophisticated simulation models, they have high computation cost due to the large number of ...

Fire eruption (also known as ‘blow-up’ or ‘flare-up’) is a very dangerous aspect of wildland fire behaviour. It poses a significant threat to the safety of wildland fire-fighters and complicates the broader problem of wildfire risk management in complex terrain. Despite the seriousness of eruptive fire events, operational wildland fire spread models generally do not account for the possibility ...

This study tested the success of fuel reduction treatments for mitigating wildfire behavior in an area that has had little previous research on fire, the southern Appalachian Mountains. A secondary objective of treatments was to restore the community to an open woodland condition. Three blocks of four treatments were installed in a mature hardwood forest in western North Carolina. Fuel reductio...

The quantitative study of wildfire data world wide revealed that wildfires exhibit power-law like frequencyarea distributions. Although models exist to predict the spread of a specific fire, there is as yet no agreement on the mechanism which drives wildfire systems on the landscape scale. A classical model in this context is the Drossel-Schwabl cellular automaton (DS-FFM) which robustly produc...

Understanding the effect of wildfire smoke exposure on human health represents a unique interdisciplinary challenge to the scientific community. Population health studies indicate that wildfire smoke is a risk to human health and increases the healthcare burden of smoke-impacted areas. However, wildfire smoke composition is complex and dynamic, making characterization and modeling difficult. Fu...

Wildfire behavior can be modified by altering the quantity, structure, and arrangement of fuel (flammable vegetation) by silvicultural treatments such as forest thinning and prescribed burning. The type and arrangement (including landscape location) of treated areas have been demonstrated to influence wildfire behavior. This study analyzes the response of several key fire behavior variables to ...

This paper explores the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in wildfire monitoring. To begin establishing effective methods for autonomous monitoring, a simulation (FLAME) is developed for algorithm testing. To simulate a wildfire, the well established FARSITE fire simulator is used to generate realistic fire behavior models. FARSITE is a wildfire simulator that is used in the field by Incid...