- Author
-
Evans, D. D.
|
Rehm, R. G.
|
McPherson, E. G.
- Title
- Physics-Based Modeling of Wildland-Urban Intermix Fires.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
USDA Forest Service, Davis, CA
- Book or Conf
- Wildland Fire Conference, 3rd International. Proceedings. October 3-6, 2003,
Sydney, Australia,
2003
- Keywords
-
wildland/urban fires
|
fire dynamics simulator
|
fire models
|
simulation
|
urban fires
|
wildland fires
|
fuels
- Identifiers
- Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS); Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) fuels
- Abstract
- This paper addresses the development of a practical physics-based model for fires in the Wildland-Urban Intermix. These fires arise when wildland burning invades the built environment. Fire models for ignition and spread must consider individual fuel elements of both vegetation and structures in order to assess fire risk of developed properties. The potential fuel loadings for various land uses demonstrates that structures generally provide much higher loadings than wildlands do. While this comparison is useful, it could also be misleading since generally, not all of the potential fuel in either the wildland or the built environment will burn. Furthermore, often the time scales for ignition and the heat release rates for the wildland fuel and the fuel in the structures will be widely disparate, and these differences will influence both the spread rate of the fire and its persistence. Although the NIST computational model known as the Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) was developed to study building fires, it is use is extended to study community-scale fires spread. The FDS model utilizes higher resolution data including the local topography, placement of buildings and vegetation, ignition and burning characteristics of fuels, and meteorological conditions to provide a time dependent simulation of fire spread in neighborhoods of structures and trees. The simulations require quantification of fire effects, such as the burning characteristics of individual trees and buildings, that are not used in the operational models of fire spread. Insight from the FDS simulations of burns on parcels containing structures and landscape vegetation are used to construct a user friendly fire model that will be implemented on a web site for use in quantifying fire resistance of properties and the effects of mitigation proposed to reduce wildfire vulnerability. The prototype of this model is demonstrated using parcel data from South Lake Tahoe, California.