Fire growth using minimum travel time methods

Abstract

Fire-growth modeling on complex landscapes can be approached as a search for the minimum time for fire to travel among nodes in a two-dimensional network. The paths producing minimum travel time between nodes are then interpolated to reveal the fire perimeter positions at an instant in time. These fire perimeters and their fire behavior characteristics (e.g., spread rate, fireline intensity) are essentially identical to the products of perimeter expansion techniques. Travel time methods offer potential advantages for some kinds of modeling applications, because they are more readily parallelized for computation than methods for expanding fire fronts and require no correction for crossed fronts or merging separate fires.