- Author
- Linn, R. R.
- Title
- Transport Model for Prediction of Wildfire Behavior.
- Coporate
- Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM
- Report
- Thesis, July 1997, 212 p.
- Distribution
- Available from National Technical Information Service
- Keywords
- wildland fires | fire behavior
- Abstract
- Wildfires are a threat to human life and property, yet they are an unavoidable part of nature. In the past people have tried to predict wildfire behavior through the use of point functional models but have been unsuccessful at adequately predicting the gross behavior of the broad spectrum of fires that occur in nature. The majority of previous models do not have self-determining propagation rates. We use a transport approach to represent this complicated problem and produce a model that utilizes a self-determining propagation rate. The transport approach allows us to represent a large number of environments including transition regions such as those with nonhomogeneous vegetation and terrain. Some of the most difficult features to trat are the imperfectly known boundary conditions and the fine scale structure that is unresolvable, such as the specific location of the fuel or the precise incoming winds. We account for the microscopic details of a fire with macroscopic resolutin by dividing quantities into mean and fluctuating parts similar to what is done in irraditional turbulence modeling.