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Type: Journal Article
Author(s): Mario Miguel Valero; Lluís Jofre; Ricardo Torres
Publication Date: 2021

Wildfire behavior predictions typically suffer from significant uncertainty. However, wildfire modeling uncertainties remain largely unquantified in the literature, mainly due to computing constraints. New multifidelity techniques provide a promising opportunity to overcome these limitations. Therefore, this paper explores the applicability of multifidelity approaches to wildland fire spread prediction problems. Using a canonical simulation scenario, we assessed the performance of control variates Monte-Carlo (MC) and multilevel MC strategies, achieving speedups of up to 100x in comparison to a standard MC method. This improvement was leveraged to quantify aleatoric uncertainties and analyze the sensitivity of the fire rate of spread (RoS) to weather and fuel parameters using a full-physics fire model, namely the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS), at an affordable computation cost. The proposed methodology may also be used to analyze uncertainty in other relevant fire behavior metrics such as heat transfer, fuel consumption and smoke production indicators.

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Citation: Valero, Mario Miguel; Jofre, Lluís; Torres, Ricardo. 2021. Multifidelity prediction in wildfire spread simulation: modeling, uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis. Environmental Modelling & Software 141:105050.

Cataloging Information

Topics:
Fire Behavior    Fuels    Models    Weather
Regions:
Alaska    California    Eastern    Great Basin    Hawaii    Northern Rockies    Northwest    Rocky Mountain    Southern    Southwest    National
Keywords:
  • FDS - Fire Dynamics Simulator
  • fire spread
  • forest fire
  • multifidelity Monte Carlo
  • predictive science
  • sensitivity analysis
  • uncertainty quantification
Record Last Modified:
Record Maintained By: FRAMES Staff (https://www.frames.gov/contact)
FRAMES Record Number: 63104