Abstract: Wildfires are becoming an increasing issue, raising concern about direct infrastructure and property damage as well as indirect effects related to their emissions. In this context, a fundamental understanding of the burning processes of wildland fuels is crucial for the modeling and prediction of both fire behavior as well as related emissions. Current fuel consumption parameterizations used in wildfire models usually oversimplify fuel consumption processes, such as flaming and smoldering combustion regimes, and fuel properties, like fuel elements' size and moisture content. In this seminar, a physics-based modeling framework developed to describe biomass combustion and emissions will be presented. Biomass is represented through its fundamental constituents, such as lignin, cellulose, hemicellulose, water, and extractives. A detailed reaction kinetic model is coupled with a multi-region single-particle model and is adopted to investigate the process of biomass degradation, including char oxidation. The validation of the modeling framework with experimental data from literature is performed at various scales, including thermogravimetric experiments and particle-scale experiments of pyrolysis and combustion. Additionally, preliminary results of its applicability for the construction of detailed parameterizations for large-scale wildfire applications, such as WRF-SFIRE coupled atmosphere-fire model, will be discussed.
Presenters: Malcolm North is a Research Forest Ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, and an Affiliate Professor of Forest Ecology, Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He received his Master of Forest Science at Yale University and his PhD in Forest Ecology from the University of Washington. His research includes work on examining forest restoration and ecosystem response, wildlife, wildfire and forest carbon dynamics published in more than 200 articles. His lab (students and postdocs) primarily focus on forest and fire ecology of Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer forests.
Marc Meyer is the Southern Sierra Province Ecologist with the USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Regional Ecology Program and serves the Inyo, Sierra, and Sequoia National Forests. His work focuses on integrating science information into land management and project planning in the southern Sierra Nevada. Marc has a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California Davis and has many years of experience studying the effects of fire and other restoration treatments on California’s ecosystems. He has published many peer-reviewed science articles in ecology, including the GTR-270 postfire restoration framework for national forests in California.