A web-based wildfire simulator for operational applications
Bachisio Arca A D , Tiziano Ghisu B , Marcello Casula A , Michele Salis A C and Pierpaolo Duce A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Institute of Biometeorology, National Research Council, Sassari, 07100, Italy.
B Department of Mechanical, Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, 09123, Italy.
C Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change, Impacts on Agriculture Forests and Ecosystem Services (IAFES) Division, Sassari, 07100, Italy.
D Corresponding author: b.arca@ibimet.cnr.it
International Journal of Wildland Fire 28(2) 99-112 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF18078
Submitted: 22 May 2018 Accepted: 5 December 2018 Published: 5 February 2019
Abstract
Wildfire simulators and decision support systems can assist the incident command teams in charge of tactical wildfire suppression. This paper presents a web-based wildfire simulator developed to provide real-time support for wildfire management. The paper describes the overall software architecture, the modelling chain characteristics and the results produced by the simulator considering a set of actual wildfires that occurred in the island of Sardinia, Italy. The simulator consists of a graphical user interface that deals with data input–output management, a mass-consistent model devoted to the downscaling of wind fields, and a module that provides a spatially explicit representation of wildfire propagation. The simulator is a client‐server application that is operated through a web-based graphical user interface that leaves the computational work to a dedicated server; most of the code is parallelised in order to minimise computational run-time. The validation phase demonstrated the capabilities of the simulator in providing wildfire predictions with a substantial agreement with actual wildfires, and a computational cost suitable for faster than real-time applications. The simulator is proposed as a tool to provide assistance to civil protection and fire management agencies during the incident response phase. The simulator is also appropriate for the training of personnel.
Additional keywords: on-line simulation, parallelisation, wildfire management, wildfire risk.
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