Concurrent multi-scale physical parametrization of fire-spotting: a study on the role of macro- and meso-scale characteristics of the system

Abstract

The strong impact of wildfires in terms of lives and homes lost and of damage to ecosystems, calls for an urgent improvement in the risk management. The aim of the present research is the improvement of these software codes by proposing a complete physical characterization of fire-spotting within an approach that is ready to be implemented as a post-processing routine of standard outputs. The main feature of the proposed method is that the effects of random fluctuations are included in a way that preserves the existing structure of the operational and industrial codes and can be implemented directly. The operational code WRF-SFIRE have been used to test the proposed post-processing routine. Results show the suitability of the approach for simulating random effects due to turbulent convection and fire-spotting, which are cases not resolved by standard operational codes. Results of simulations including response analysis with test cases are shown and discussed.