A) CONFERENCE OVERVIEW AND ASSIGNED GOALS
The modelling of forest fire spread involves various physical scales, from the microscopic
scales associated with combustion and heat conduction, to macroscopic scales
associated with landscape and weather. Various mathematical and statistical methods
are needed to understand this multi-level process. In this workshop, we focus on
forest fire growth modelling and management.
The workshop follows the
MITACS/GEOIDE Summer school
on Mathematical and Statistical Descriptions of Forest Fire Spread, June
15-19, 2009 at the same venue. It is expected that a number of senior students from this
school will stay on site to attend the workshop.
Recent progress under the PROMETHEUS/MITACS project `Forest fire spread in heterogeneous landscape'
presents a unique opportunity to review recent results and to identify promising directions for further
research. Both mathematical and statistical approaches will be represented as well as fire behaviour
prediction (FBP) system issues and other aspects of fire management. Questions around which the workshop
will be focussed:
1. How should randomness be incorporated into spread
models, and what type of data is or should be available
to calibrate such models?
2. How can processes such as spotting and suppression
be best incorporated into current models?
We have purposely designed the meeting to be informal. Each day will begin with a plenary talk. Featured
speakers are
Jim Gould
(CSIRO, Australia)
and
John Dold
(U of Manchester, UK).
These talks will be followed by
a mix of shorter contributed talks by fire scientists and numerous roundtable sessions to encourage interaction
amongst the diverse group of scientists attending.
In addition to the MITACS and GEOIDE scientists at the meeting, students and
postdoctoral fellows we expect personnel from Alberta Government will lend a substantial presence
at the workshop.
B) POST-CONFERENCE REPORT BY THE ORGANIZERS
The workshop was confirmed as a great success by all attending. Twenty-two participants were present
during the two-day program. This number included four Government Scientists from both the Alberta SRD and the
CFS and at least 7 students and postdocs interested in fire research. Some of these
students had stayed on in Hinton after the
previous week's Summer School to attend the workshop.
Jim Gould
(CFS-CSIRO Australia) began the meeting with a provocative talk on the challenges presented by
the many forms of uncertainty present in today's fire models. Jim's vast experience in both the Canadian and Australian fire landscapes, his broad and scholarly approach to the subject and his ability to
'see both the forest AND the trees' puts him in a unique position to comment on these fundamental
and sometimes unsettling challenges to the fire modelling community. His 75 minute talk was followed by a lively question and answer period.
John Dold
(Manchester) introduced us to the concept of the 'Byram number' and its use in semi-physical
models of unsteady bushfire. An application of Byram's number to the poorly understood and dangerous phenomenon of `eruptive fire' gave us an excellent example of an effective mathematical modelling approach, and its power to steer fire researchers to ask new and critical questions aimed at getting to the root of such complex behavior.
John's one hour talk was followed by a lively question and answer period.
Five contributed talks on other aspects of randomness and uncertainty in fire modelling were given
during the workshop (see the conference program for details). Six one-hour roundtables were held on the topics
of Forest Fire Risk, Stochasticity in Fire Models, Acceleration in Spread Rates, Incorporating Wind in Empirical Spread Models, Forest Carbon Mapping and Distributions and The Fire Spotting Process.
It was generally agreed that the format of short talks, interspersed with lively roundtable discussions
was highly effective in promoting open exchange of scientific information amongst participants.
Participants and organizers were extremely satisfied with the venue (The Hinton Training Centre) and
we hope to be able to use these facilities again for future workshops. We would like to thank the
sponsors and staff of the Training Centre for their service and support.
An
newspaper article about the Summer School was published in the local newspaper, the Hinton Parklander, much to the delight of both organizers and participants.
The next event planned on this topic is a BIRS workshop awarded for November, 2010. Organizers are
Bose/Bourlioux//Braun.
C) PARTICIPANT LIST
Chris Bose (Victoria),
Jim Gould (CFS-CSIRO),
Cordy Tymstra (Alberta SRD),
Jonathan Lee (Western)
Michael Francis (Victoria),
Thomas Hillen (Alberta),
Anne Bourlioux (Montreal),
Reg Kulperger (Western),
Hao Yu (Western),
Martin Alexander (CFS),
Jennifer Beverly (CFS),
John Braun (Western),
Fangliang He (Alberta),
Yanping He (Victoria),
Jin Song Chen (Alberta),
Yanping Wang (Alberta),
Doug Woolford (Simon Fraser),
Ed Johnson (Calgary),
Kiyoko Miyanishi (Calgary),
Mary Ann Jenkins (York),
Sean Michaletz (Calgary),
John Dold (Manchester UK),
Jeff Picka (New Brunswick).
D) ACTION ITEMS
1. US forest fire researchers are moving strongly in the direction of fully physical models of combustion
coupled with elaborate numerical fluid dynamic atmosphere models. None of these
programs has produced an operational software package for field use to date;
they are mostly research-only tools for fire scientists. While improved computing power
will undoubtedly bring these complex simulators closer to real time computations, the
timeline is not clear. Therefore, for the time being,
continued development of the existing
empirical spread models is a sensible approach.
2. The current best approach for a more encompassing simulation
seems to be a hybrid model, coupling fluid dynamical descriptions of the atmosphere to
empirical spread of fire on the ground. There is a whole range of
detail that can be considered for the fluid coupling and this is a high
priority research direction for our project scientists.
This situation also gives another reason to continue with
development of empirical models such as PROMETHEUS.
3. Specific modelling challenges included in Item 2 above include:
(a) incorporating detailed wind flow into the spread model, and putting
in some simple coupling of the local wind with the effects of
the convective column. (b) modelling the
complex process of mid to long range spotting (200m to 2km). Spotting
is a sub-dominant fire spread mode in the boreal forest, but may
become more significant in our changing forests, particularly
with fire in beetle killed stands. (c) modelling
of the unsteady (acceleration) phase of fire growth. A poll taken at the
workshop indicated that this last item (acceleration) should be the lowest
priority of the three, but as we heard later from John Dold, acceleration
in the form of 'eruptive fire' is of high priority for our European
counterparts, so perhaps we should reconsider. (d) There was a call,
particularly from the experienced operational fire participants at
the workshop, to investigate the modelling of suppression efforts on
active fire fronts. This last item seems to be a completely unexplored
area at the present time.
4. There is great opportunity and much interest to link the
mathematical and statistical
aspects of this problem. Up until now the former has been more of
concern to the MITACS scientists and the latter to the GEOIDE group,
but there
is a real chance for cross-fertilization between the groups. For
example, at the workshop, many
of the roundtable discussions touched on the essential component of
uncertainty in the (nominally deterministic) details of spread models.
Also, as more sophisticated empirical models are developed, they will
need finely
structured and many-dimensional data on the physical parameters at
play, possibly
through enhanced remote sensing activity on fire sites.
Finally, on the issue of remote sensing and real-time data streams for
active fires, there
is clearly potential for a big impact IF the data can be produced and
analyzed
in REAL real-time. There remains a fair degree of scepticism amongst
fire
operations managers and scientists on this issue. As one notably
observed: `three hours is
not real-time in the bushfire business'. This area presents a
significant
challenge, therefore, but one with potentially high value.
