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Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., 4, 497-545, 2011
www.geosci-model-dev-discuss.net/4/497/2011/ doi:10.5194/gmdd-4-497-2011 © Author(s) 2011. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. |
Coupled atmosphere-wildland fire modeling with WRF-Fire version 3.3
1Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA
2Department of Meteorology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Abstract. We describe the physical model, numerical algorithms, and software structure of WRF-Fire. WRF-Fire consists of a fire-spread model, implemented by the level-set method, coupled with the Weather Research and Forecasting model. In every time step, the fire model inputs the surface wind, which drives the fire, and outputs the heat flux from the fire into the atmosphere, which in turn influences the atmosphere. The level-set method allows submesh representation of the burning region and flexible implementation of various kinds of ignition. WRF-Fire is distributed as a part of WRF and it uses the WRF parallel infrastructure for parallel computing.
Citation: Mandel, J., Beezley, J. D., and Kochanski, A. K.: Coupled atmosphere-wildland fire modeling with WRF-Fire version 3.3, Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., 4, 497-545, doi:10.5194/gmdd-4-497-2011, 2011.