Impact of Weather Covariates on Wildfire in Tanjung Puting National Park

This paper explores wildfire modeling based on meteorological variables for Tanjung Puting National Park, located on the island of Borneo. A separable model is developed for predicting daily wildfire burn area using variables such as temperature, sea level pressure, humidity, precipitation, visibility, and wind speed. Each component in the model is estimated using kernel smoothing and maximum likelihood methods. The data are shown to be largely compatible with the separable model, suggesting that the relationship between wildfire burn area and any of these weather variables in particular does not appear to change significantly depending on the values of the other weather variables. The analysis appears to confirm the findings of previous studies on wildfire in Southern California which indicate that wildfire hazard may be suitably estimated using a simple multiplicative model where the impact of each weather covariate is estimated separately.

Studying wildfire behavior using FIRETEC

A coupled atmospheric/wildfire behavior model is described that utilizes physics-based process models to represent wildfire behavior. Five simulations are presented, four of which are highly idealized situations that are meant to illustrate some of the dependencies of the model on environmental conditions. The fifth simulation consists of a fire burning in complex terrain with non-homogeneous vegetation and realistic meteorological conditions. The simulated fire behavior develops out of the coupling of a set of very complex processes and not from prescribed rules based on empirical data. This represents a new direction in wildfire modeling that we believe will eventually help decision makers and land managers do their jobs more effectively.