Intermediate-scale fire behavior measurements in the field: Bridging the gap between laboratory experiments and management-scale prescribed fires

Abstract

The dynamics of fire propagation through forest fuels are best characterized as a coupled fuel – fire – atmosphere system, where key interactions among processes at each scale become the basis for interpreting overall fire behavior across scales. While wildfires dominate the combustion of forest fuels in the western USA, prescribed fires are of greater significance in the eastern USA, where they are conducted primarily to reduce hazardous fuel loads and maintain desired ecological structure and functioning in forests (Agee and Skinner 2005, NIFC 2018). Much of our understanding of combustion processes, turbulence, and energy exchange during prescribed fires is derived from measurements made at two separate scales; small-scale laboratory experiments and large-scale operational prescribed fires. Integrating results across scales using physics-based fire behavior models has highlighted benefits and limitations of both approaches, and has revealed a number of uncertainties that remain to be resolved.

Citation

Clark, Kenneth; Gallagher, Michael; Skowronski, Nick; Patterson, Matthew; Heilman, Warren E.; Bian, Xindi; Charney, Joseph J.; Hom, John; Mueller, Eric; Hadden, Rory; Campbell-Lockrie, Zakary; Walker-Ravena, Carlos; Kremens, Robert. 2019. Intermediate-scale fire behavior measurements in the field: Bridging the gap between laboratory experiments and management-scale prescribed fires. In: Proceedings of the 6th Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference, April 29 – May 3, 2019,​​​ Albuquerque, New Mexico USA. Missoula, MT: International Association of Wildland Fire: 615-620.​