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

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.