Wildland Fire: Improving the Fidelity of Coupled Atmosphere-Fire Simulations to Manage Our Fiery Future

Improving the Fidelity of Coupled Atmosphere-Fire Simulations to Manage Our Fiery Future
Jeff Mirocha
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Wildfires are part of our future. While prevention was the dream of yesterday, the realities of today and tomorrow involve management, mitigation and coexistence. To do these effectively, we need better knowledge, and better simulation tools. Coupled atmosphere-wildfire simulations can assist these endeavors, however simulating fire behavior in complex environments is beset by numerous challenges, including the simplicity of widely used fire spread models ,marginal characterization of the state of fuels, and limitations of landscape-scale simulation frameworks to capture fire spread and atmosphere-fire interactions heterogeneous landscapes, including steep terrain, and the built environment. We describe current efforts underway within our wildfire research group to address these shortcomings within both current and next-generation atmospheric simulations tools, including improvement of landscape fuel characterization and wildfire risk using machine learning, the use of chemical combustion codes to improved fire spread and emissions in both natural and built environments, and the use of immersed boundary methods to capture steep terrain and urban structures.

For seminar information, please contact Derek Fong at dfong@stanford.edu