Publication Date
8-28-2023
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Geophysical Research Letters
Volume
50
Issue
16
DOI
10.1029/2023GL104193
Abstract
This study investigated the sensitivity of pyrocumulonimbus (PyroCb) induced by the California Creek fire of 2020 to the amount and type of surface fuels, within the WRF-SFIRE modeling system. Satellite data were used to derive fire arrival times to constrain fire progression, and to augment the fuel characterization with better estimates of combustible vegetation accounting for tree mortality. Machine learning was employed to classify standing dead vegetation from aerial imagery, which was then added as a custom fuel class along with the standard Anderson fuel categories. Simulations using this new fuel class produced a larger and more vigorous PyroCb than the control run, however, still under-predicted the cloud top. Additional augmentation of fuel mass to represent the accumulation of dead vegetation on the forest floor further improved the simulations, demonstrating the efficacy of representing both dead standing and fallen vegetation to produce more realistic PyroCb and smoke simulations.
Funding Number
8GG21829
Funding Sponsor
National Science Foundation
Keywords
combustible biomass fuel, pyroconvection, pyrocumulonimbus, wildland fire
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Meteorology and Climate Science
Recommended Citation
Jungmin M. Lee, Jeffrey D. Mirocha, Neil P. Lareau, Taylor Whitney, Wing To, Adam Kochanski, and William Lassman. "Sensitivity of Pyrocumulus Convection to Tree Mortality During the 2020 Creek Fire in California" Geophysical Research Letters (2023). https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL104193
