Post-frontal Combustion Heat Modeling in DEVS-fire for Coupled Atmosphere-fire Simulation

Modeling the heat released from a burning wildfire is essential to support coupled atmosphere-fire simulation. This paper presents post-frontal combustion heat modeling in the wildfire spread model of DEVS-FIRE. The developed heat model integrates features from both the BURNUP model and the heat model of WRF-Fire to compute the heat flux of wildfire. To model fuel consumption, it uses the BURNUP model to calculate the burning time and employs an exponentially decreasing fuel mass loss curve to derive the fuel consumption rate. Experiment results are presented and compared with those from the heat model of WRF-Fire. Using the developed heat model, a coupled atmosphere-fire simulation based on DEVS-FIRE and the ARPS atmospheric model is run to demonstrate the impact of the mutual interaction between wildfire and weather on wildfire spread.