ELMFIRE- Eulerian Level Set Model of FIRE spread

ELMFIRE, the Eulerian Level set Model of FIRE spread, is open-source software Licensed under the Eclipse Public License - 2.0 (EPLv2). It is a wildland fire spread model that can be used to:

• Forecast the spread of fires in real time.

• Reconstruct the spread of historical fires.

• Quantify landscape-scale fire behavior potential.

• Estimate annual burn probability and fire severity.

Getting started

This section explains installation and configuration of ELMFIRE.

• Getting Started
  • Install prerequisites
  • Clone ELMFIRE Github repository
  • Set environment variables
  • Build ELMFIRE executables

Tutorials

The best way to learn to use ELMFIRE is to use ELMFIRE. To that end, a series of tutorials is presented here, starting with very simple idealized cases and progressing to complex simulations involving real-world fuel and weather inputs.

• Tutorials
  • Tutorial 01: fire spread in flat terrain under constant wind
  • Tutorial 02: fire spread in flat terrain under transient wind
  • Tutorial 03: fire spread in real-world fuel/terrain under constant/uniform wind
  • Tutorial 04: Landscape-scale fire potential

Verification

After completing the tutorials above, it is recommended to work through the verification test cases below.

• Verification
  • Verification Case 01: Elliptical fire shape
  • Verification Case 02: Crown Fire

Validation

ELMFIRE is packaged with a series of command line microservices clients that provide access to fire perimeter data that can be used for model validation. Some examples are presented below.

• Validation
  • Validation Cases
    • Validation Case 01: Single Fire
    • Validation Case 02: Multiple Fires
  • References

User guide

ELMFIRE’s source code, build scripts/makefiles, documentation, tutorials, and verification & validation (V+V) cases are in ELMFIRE’s GitHub repository. Please see the Getting Started page for instructions on how to obtain the source code, install prerequisites, set necessary environment variables, etc.

• User Guide
  • Basic Inputs and Outputs
    • Inputs
      • Fuels, weather, and topography
      • Assets at Risk
      • Computational domain size, extents, and resolution
      • Time
      • Fire Initialization
        • Point source ignitions
        • Active fire perimeters
    • Outputs
  • Physics and Numerics options
    • Elliptical dimensions
    • Crown fire
    • Wind fluctuations
    • Miscellaneous inputs
  • Spotting
  • Suppression
    • Initial Attack
    • Extended Attack
  • Monte Carlo Analysis
    • Randomized ignition locations
    • Randomized weather streams
    • Spatial and temporal perturbations of input rasters
    • Randomized wind fluctuation intensities
    • Outputs

Technical reference

• Technical Reference
  • Spread Rate Formulation
    • Basics of Eulerian level set methods
    • Vectoring the Rothermel model to calculate head fire spread rate and direction
    • Elliptical dimensions to calculate spread rate at other orientations
    • Correcting for slope
    • Variation in fireline intensity along the fire perimeter
    • Linking crown and surface fire