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Track: Forestry
Pin-Shuo Liu
University of California, Riverside
650 Lakewood Drive
Riverside, CA 92506
Telephone: 909-789-1378
Fax: 909-787-4324
E-mail: benjamin@ucrac1.ucr.edu
Yue-Hong Chou
A Grid Automation of Wildfire Growth Simulation
Defining Issue: Each year wildfires cause tremendous loss of natural resources, endangered species, human lives, and property. A better understanding of the direction, location, rate of spread, intensity, and burned areas of wildfires is an important issue for both long-term wildfire management planning and effective suppression strategies. GIS Solution: This research provides a cell automation method to simulate wildfire propagation over spatial and temporal variability by using a grid-based GIS. Fire growth direction and location are simulated based on the probability value of fire occurrence of each grid cell. A spatial model of fire occurrence probability (Chou 1991, 1992, 1993, Chou et al 1990, 1993) was used to construct the distribution of fire occurrence probability in the Bee Canyon of the San Jacinto Mountains, where a major fire occurred in 1996. Rothermel's model was employed to estimate the rate of spread and fire intensity. The simulated pattern of fire growth was compared to the
empirical distribution of fire propagation. The results indicate that the cell automation method could provide useful information for management of wildfires over a heterogeneous landscape.
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