Data preparation for fire behaviour fuel modelling in the test case of Zlatograd forestry department

Abstract

Since the year 2000 Bulgaria is facing progressive increase of wildland fire occurrence. That is caused mainly because of human mistakes in having fire camps or agricultural land processing after crop harvesting. At the moment Bulgaria has no working mechanism to spot such fires before they become a threat, however the team from Bulgarian Academy of Sciences is working on fire behaviour modelling issues since 2007 and in this work will be presented the first attempts for Bulgarian forestry data classification according to the existing 53 FBFMs, and estimations where custom fuels has to be prepared for better representation of the potential fire spread. Calibrations with FARSITE runs have been performed for the area of Zlatograd Forestry Department (Bulgaria) data set (Dobrinkova et. all 2014). The results are compared with Harmanli (Bulgaria) WRF-Fire/S-Fire simulations (Jordanov et. all 2012) in order to see how the different fire behaviour fuel models estimations reflect in the final simulated burned area. Conclusions for fire behaviour fuel modelling based on both simulation approaches in Zlatograd and Harmanli areas gives future application of the presented work for Bulgarian test cases.