- Title:
-
Fire probability mapping using the Bushfire CRC fire spread simulator
- Date:
- September 2008
- Organisations
- School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Western Australia
- Authors:
- P. Johnston, G. Milne, J. Kelso
- Location:
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
Overview
A prerequisite for performing risk analysis of a fire situation is to know the likelihood that a fire spreads to a given location by a given time. Fire simulators and computer power are now sufficient to perform multiple simulations of a single fire in order to estimate the probability that a fire reaches any point on the landscape. The Bushfire CRC fire spread simulator, due to it's speed, is ideally suited as an engine for calculation of probability of fire spread. Being cell-based, it is simple to determine the probability of a fire reaching a given location by recording the percentage of simulations for which each cell is ignited at a given time. If the distribution of weather inputs is known, simulations using input data extracted from this distribution can be used to run many simulations and a fire probability map can be generated.
Given that the Bushfire CRC simulator can run a simulation in a few seconds on a desktop PC or laptop, a probability map can be generated in a few minutes. This will aid fire planners in considering low probability but potentially high impact scenarios particularly in the wildland urban interface, leading to better decision-making in fire fighting.
