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RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

The distributed strategy for asynchronous observations in data-driven wildland fire spread prediction

Mengxia Zha https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0627-2683 A B , Zheng Wang https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2391-5372 A B , Jie Ji A B * and Jiping Zhu A B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Jin Zhai Road 96, Hefei 230026, Anhui, China.

B MEM Key Laboratory of Forest Fire Monitoring and Warning, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, Anhui, China.

* Correspondence to: jijie232@ustc.edu.cn

International Journal of Wildland Fire 33, WF23165 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF23165
Submitted: 6 October 2023  Accepted: 3 June 2024  Published: 16 July 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

Background

Asynchronous observations refer to observations that are obtained at multiple moments. The observation moments of fire fronts may differ throughout an entire wildfire area. Asynchronous observations include historical data, which hinders the effectiveness of data assimilation due to the lack of timely updates on changing fire fronts.

Aims

This paper proposed a distributed strategy combined with the Ensemble Transform Kalman filter (ETKF-distributed) for asynchronous observations. It can assimilate fire fronts immediately at any location by using new matching schemes between prediction and observation.

Methods

The ETKF-distributed undergoes testing using a wildland fire generated based on real terrain, vegetation, and historical weather data from the local area. In addition, the ETKF and ETKF-centralised proposed in our previous work were employed as comparisons. Observing System Simulation Experiments were conducted to generate asynchronous observation fire fronts.

Key results

The benefit of immediate assimilation enables the new method to maintain high accuracy predictions.

Conclusions

The allocation of observation resources can be focused in regions with high rates of speed when employing ETKF-distributed.

Implications

The ETKF-distributed has high efficiency and adaptability, making it highly promising for implementation in wildfire prediction.

Keywords: asynchronous observations, data assimilation, distributed strategy, Ensemble Transform Kalman filter, high-accuracy prediction, immediate assimilation, Observing System Simulation Experiments, wildland fire.

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