Treesearch

Fire has been attributed as one of the most influential factors in vegetation community and succession in the Sierra de Manantlán Biosphere Reserve in Jalisco and Colima, México. A mosaic of low, mixed and high severity fire regimes characterizes the landscape with ecosystems ranging from mesophyllous mountain forest to higher elevation pine and oak forest. Research needs to be done to ascertain the fire regime(s) and historical range of variability in the biosphere reserve in order to facilitate scientifically informed land and fire management plans.

WindNinja is a standalone computer model designed to provide the user with simulations of surface wind flow. It is deterministic and steady state. It is currently being modified to allow the user to initialize the flow calculation using National Digital Forecast Database. It essentially allows the user to downscale the coarse scale simulations from meso-scale models to finer resolution.

Large scale fire whirls have not traditionally been recognized as a frequent phenomenon on wildland fires. However, there are anecdotal data suggesting that they can and do occur with some regularity. This paper presents a brief summary of this information and an analysis of the causal factors leading to their formation.

Advances in electronic technology over the last several decades have been staggering. The cost of electronics continues to decrease while system performance increases seemingly without limit. We have applied modern techniques in sensors, electronics and instrumentation to create a suite of ground based diagnostics that can be used in laboratory (~ 1 m2), field scale (~ 100 m2) and landscape scale (106 m2) experiments. These sensor suites are inexpensive, compact, and lightweight and measure relevant physical fire behavior measurable like fire power, total energy release, mass flow (3-D,...

Extensive forested areas have received fuels treatments in recent decades and significant funding is available for additional treatments in an attempt to mitigate undesirable high wildfire intensities and impacts. Fuel treatment successes and failures in moderating fire behavior and effects can be found in quantified and anecdotal reports. Questions remain about the efficacy of biomass removal projects for modifying wildfire characteristics such as; (1) Do wildfires respond to fuel treatments differently under different fire weather? (2) Are fire behavior changes within fuel treatments...

Studies have indicated that changes in wildland fire activity are, at least in part, a product of climate change. Fire danger indices, driven by climatology, should reflect these changes. Energy Release Component (ERC) is considered to be an effective indicator of drought conditions and seasonal drying of forest fuels and is often used in fire management planning. McHugh (2010) found that ERC has increased in the Greater Yellowstone Area over the past fifty years. We expand upon prior work to examine possible trends in both climate driver variables and the fire danger rating indices in the...

Mathematical modeling of fire behavior prediction is only possible if the models are supplied with an information database that provides spatially explicit input parameters for modeled area. Mathematical models can be of three kinds: 1) physical; 2) empirical; and 3) quasi-empirical (Sullivan, 2009). Physical models (Grishin, 1992) are of academic interest only because current vegetation monitoring techniques make it virtually impossible to parameterize the model precluding its general application in wildland fire management (Sullivan, 2009). Empirical models (Vonsky, 1957; Amosov, 1964;...

The BehavePlus fire modeling system is the successor to BEHAVE, which was first used in the field in 1984. It is public domain software, available for free use on personal computers. Information on user communities and fire management applications can be useful in designing next generation systems. Several sources of information about BehavePlus are summarized to indicate the number of users, level of use relative to other systems, and fire and fuel management applications that BehavePlus supports.

The current safety zone guidelines used in the US were developed based on the assumption that the fire and safety zone were located on flat terrain. The minimum safe distance for a firefighter to be from a flame was calculated as that corresponding to a radiant incident energy flux level of 7.0kW-m-2. Current firefighter safety guidelines are based on the assumption that radiant energy transfer is the dominant energy transfer mode. Intuition, professional observations, and the few experimental measurements that have been reported indicate that when fires are located on slopes or ridges...

A system consisting of two enclosures has been developed to characterize wildand fire behavior: The first enclosure is a sensor/data logger combination that measures and records convective/radiant energy released by the fire. The second is a digital video camera housed in a fire proof enclosure that records visual images of fire behavior. Together this system provides a robust relatively inexpensive, system for characterizing wildland fire behavior.