Publication Date
1-1-2021
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Title
World Congress in Computational Mechanics and ECCOMAS Congress
Volume
800
DOI
10.23967/wccm-eccomas.2020.210
First Page
1
Last Page
8
Abstract
A variety of wildfire models are currently used for prescribed fire management, fire behaviour studies and decision support during wildfire emergencies, among other applications. All these applications are based on predictive analysis, and therefore require careful estimation of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties such as weather conditions, vegetation properties and model parameters. However, the large computational cost of high-fidelity computaional fluid dynamics models prohibits the straightforward utilization of traditional Monte Carlo methods. Conversely, low-fidelity fire models are several orders of magnitude faster but they typically do not provide enough accuracy and they do not resolve all relevant phenomena. Multifidelity frameworks offer a viable solution to this limitation through the efficient combination of high-and low-fidelity simulations. While high-fidelity models provide the required level of accuracy, low-fidelity simulations are used to economically improve the confidence on estimated uncertainty. In this work, we assessed the suitability of multifidelity methodologies to quantify uncertainty in wildfire simulations. A collection of different multifidelity strategies, including Multilevel and Control Variates Monte Carlo, were tested and their computational efficiency compared. Fire spread was predicted in a canonical scenario using popular simulators such as the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS) and FARSITE. Results show that multifidelity estimators allow speedups in the order of 100× to 1000× with respect to traditional Monte Carlo.
Funding Number
BGP18/ 00026
Funding Sponsor
National Science Foundation
Keywords
Computational fluid dynamics, Forest fire, Multifidelity modeling, Predictive science, Uncertainty quantification
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Department
Meteorology and Climate Science
Recommended Citation
Mario Miguel Valero, Lluís Jofre, and Ricardo Torres. "Multifidelity approaches for uncertainty estimation in wildfire spread simulators" World Congress in Computational Mechanics and ECCOMAS Congress (2021): 1-8. https://doi.org/10.23967/wccm-eccomas.2020.210
