Publication Date

3-1-2022

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

International Journal of Wildland Fire

Volume

31

Issue

3

DOI

10.1071/WF21057

First Page

306

Last Page

325

Abstract

A microscale wildfire model, QES-Fire, that dynamically couples the fire front to microscale winds was developed using a simplified physics rate of spread (ROS) model, a kinematic plume-rise model and a mass-consistent wind solver. The model is three-dimensional and couples fire heat fluxes to the wind field while being more computationally efficient than other coupled models. The plume-rise model calculates a potential velocity field scaled by the ROS model's fire heat flux. Distinct plumes are merged using a multiscale plume-merging methodology that can efficiently represent complex fire fronts. The plume velocity is then superimposed on the ambient winds and the wind solver enforces conservation of mass on the combined field, which is then fed into the ROS model and iterated on until convergence. QES-Fire's ability to represent plume rise is evaluated by comparing its results with those from an atmospheric large-eddy simulation (LES) model. Additionally, the model is compared with data from the FireFlux II field experiment. QES-Fire agrees well with both the LES and field experiment data, with domain-integrated buoyancy fluxes differing by less than 17% between LES and QES-Fire and less than a 10% difference in the ROS between QES-Fire and FireFlux II data.

Funding Number

1013396

Funding Sponsor

National Science Foundation

Keywords

buoyant plume, diagnostic wind solver, fire-atmosphere coupling, level set method, merging plumes, plume rise model, rate of spread, simplified fire spread physics

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Department

Meteorology and Climate Science

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