Map partitioning to accelerate wind field calculation for forest fire propagation prediction

Abstract

Forest fire is significantly affected by wind. However, meteorological wind is modified by terrain topography in such a way that a different value of wind speed and direction is given on every point. To estimate forest fire propagation on such conditions it is necessary to couple a wind field model to the forest fire propagation model. These models are time consuming from the computational point of view and may be parallelised to make them feasible in an operational scenario. So, a map partitioning has been applied to accelerate wind field calculation. The results show that the wind field and the forest fire propagation prediction are not significantly affected by map partitioning and the time to reach the forest fire prediction is significantly reduced.