Identification

Title

Sensitivity of burned area and fire radiative power predictions to containment efforts, fuel density, and fuel moisture using WRF-fire

Abstract

Predicting the evolution of burned area, smoke emissions, and energy release from wildfires is crucial to air quality forecasting and emergency response planning yet has long posed a significant scientific challenge. Here we compare predictions of burned area and fire radiative power from the coupled weather/fire-spread model WRF-Fire (Weather and Research Forecasting Tool with fire code), against simpler methods typically used in air quality forecasts. We choose the 2019 Williams Flats Fire as our test case due to a wealth of observations and ignite the fire on different days and under different configurations. Using a novel re-gridding scheme, we compare WRF-Fire's heat output to geostationary satellite data at 1-hr temporal resolution. We also evaluate WRF-Fire's time-resolved burned area against high-resolution imaging from the National Infrared Operations aircraft data. Results indicate that for this study, accounting for containment efforts in WRF-Fire simulations makes the biggest difference in achieving accurate results for daily burned area predictions. When incorporating novel containment line inputs, fuel density increases, and fuel moisture observations into the model, the error in average daily burned area is 30% lower than persistence forecasting over a 5-day forecast. Prescribed diurnal cycles and those resolved by WRF-Fire simulations show a phase offset of at least an hour ahead of observations, likely indicating the need for dynamic fuel moisture schemes. This work shows that with proper configuration and input data, coupled weather/fire-spread modeling has the potential to improve smoke emission forecasts.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7gb284s

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2023-09-27T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact