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A High Resolution Coupled Fire-Atmosphere Forecasting System to Minimize the Impacts of Wildland Fires: Applications to the Chimney Tops II Wildland Event
Jiménez, P.A.; Muñoz-Esparza, D.; Kosović, B. A High Resolution Coupled Fire–Atmosphere Forecasting System to Minimize the Impacts of Wildland Fires: Applications to the Chimney Tops II Wildland Event. Atmosphere2018, 9, 197.
Jiménez, P.A.; Muñoz-Esparza, D.; Kosović, B. A High Resolution Coupled Fire–Atmosphere Forecasting System to Minimize the Impacts of Wildland Fires: Applications to the Chimney Tops II Wildland Event. Atmosphere 2018, 9, 197.
Jiménez, P.A.; Muñoz-Esparza, D.; Kosović, B. A High Resolution Coupled Fire–Atmosphere Forecasting System to Minimize the Impacts of Wildland Fires: Applications to the Chimney Tops II Wildland Event. Atmosphere2018, 9, 197.
Jiménez, P.A.; Muñoz-Esparza, D.; Kosović, B. A High Resolution Coupled Fire–Atmosphere Forecasting System to Minimize the Impacts of Wildland Fires: Applications to the Chimney Tops II Wildland Event. Atmosphere 2018, 9, 197.
Abstract
Wildland fires are responsible for large socio-economic impacts. Fires affect the environment, damage structures, threaten lives, cause health issues, and involve large suppression costs. These impacts can be mitigated via accurate fire spread forecast to inform the incident management team. We show that a fire forecast system based on a numerical weather prediction (NWP) model coupled with a wildland fire behavior model can provide this forecast. This is illustrated with the Chimney Tops II wildland fire responsible for large socio-economic impacts. The system is run at high horizontal resolution (111 m) over the region affected by the fire to provide a fine representation of the terrain and fuel heterogeneities and explicitly resolve atmospheric turbulence. Our findings suggest that one can use the high spatial resolution winds, fire spread and smoke forecast to minimize the adverse impacts of wildland fires.
Keywords
operational forecast sytem; fire modeling; numerical weather prediction; high spatial reoslution; WRF-Fire
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Atmospheric Science and Meteorology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
