MTTfireCAL Package for R—An Innovative, Comprehensive, and Fast Procedure to Calibrate the MTT Fire Spread Modelling System

Abstract

Fire spread behavior models are used to estimate fire behavior metrics, fire hazard, exposure, and risk across the landscape. One of the most widely used fire spread models is the minimum travel time (MTT), which requires a very time-consuming, interactive, trial-and-error calibration process to reproduce observed fire regimens. This study presents the MTTfireCAL package for R, a tool that enables fast calibration of the MTT fire spread models by testing and combining multiple settings and then ranking them based on the model’s capacity to reproduce historical fire patterns, such as fire size distribution and fire frequency. Here, we explain the main methodological steps and validate the package by comparing it against the typical calibration procedures in two study areas. In addition, we estimate the minimum number of fire runs required to ensure a reliable calibration. Overall, the use of MTTfireCAL R package and the optimization of the number of ignitions used allowed for a faster calibration of the MTT modeling system than the typical trial-and-error calibration. The MTT modeling system calibrated using MTTfireCAL was also able to better reproduce the historical fire patterns. This tool has the potential to support the academic and operational community working with MTT.