Presentation
Wildfires Simulation, Front Evolution, Fire induced Weather and Pollution
Speaker
Event Type
Focus Session
Education and Training
Parallel Applications
Scientific Software Development
Visualization & Virtual Reality
TimeTuesday, June 26th2:52pm - 3:15pm
LocationPanorama 3
DescriptionAullene fire devastated more than 3000ha of Mediterranean maquis and pine forest in July 2009. Simulation of combustion processes as well as atmospherics dynamics represents a challenge for such scenarios because of the scale of the phenomenon. A coupled approach between Meso-NH (Non-Hydrostatic) LES (Large Eddy Simulation) meso/microscale scale atmospheric model and ForeFire area simulator has been developed to predict fine to large-scale phenomenon’s involved in such wildfire, showing that such simulation was possible in a reasonable time using current supercomputers.
Increased availability of supercomputers able to simulate such phenomenon opened the way for the FireCaster program that has been experimentally running in routine for the whole 2017 fire season, providing high resolution fire/weather and fire propagation forecast for ongoing fires that devastated the island of Corsica (worst year since 2009). High resolution (600m) and High frequency (state every 120s for daily 42 hours simulation) required to redesign the way simulation outputs were delivered to decision support systems, with online GPU generated 3d visualisation and VR animations instead of standard weather maps.
Two-way coupling simulation involve the surface wind to drive the fire while heat (combustion) and water vapour fluxes are injected in the atmosphere at each atmospheric time step. To be representative of the phenomenon, a sub-meter resolution must be used for the simulation of the fire front while atmospheric simulation were performed at 50m resolution.
Meso-NH and ForeFire resolutions are independent and the computational time needed by the surface model is a typically a fraction of the atmospheric simulation.
Increased availability of supercomputers able to simulate such phenomenon opened the way for the FireCaster program that has been experimentally running in routine for the whole 2017 fire season, providing high resolution fire/weather and fire propagation forecast for ongoing fires that devastated the island of Corsica (worst year since 2009). High resolution (600m) and High frequency (state every 120s for daily 42 hours simulation) required to redesign the way simulation outputs were delivered to decision support systems, with online GPU generated 3d visualisation and VR animations instead of standard weather maps.
Two-way coupling simulation involve the surface wind to drive the fire while heat (combustion) and water vapour fluxes are injected in the atmosphere at each atmospheric time step. To be representative of the phenomenon, a sub-meter resolution must be used for the simulation of the fire front while atmospheric simulation were performed at 50m resolution.
Meso-NH and ForeFire resolutions are independent and the computational time needed by the surface model is a typically a fraction of the atmospheric simulation.
Speaker