WRF-Fire development notes

This page tracks activity in the WRF-Fire and related software development. All members of the fildfires communicty are welcome to get an account and edit.

Wish list

Add your suggestions or plans here. If you want to comment on any of the items, please start a new section of the talk page and link to it here.

• Remove the ugly includes in the argument lists to get the coefficients down the call chain to the spread rate calculations. Pass the coefficients by pointers defined in a module instead. Declare the pointers in the module, or pass them around in a single derived type argument. This is a necessary step before including the weather and fire components into VisTrails separately.
• A standalone driver for the fire code that is independent of WRF for diagnostics. See discussion.
• Merge with WRF 3.2
• Modify WPS to compute terrain gradient at data resolution and interpolate it to the fire mesh for better representation of the effect of terrain on the acceleration in the fire rate of spread.
• Take the winds from a given height, and set the height in the namelist.
• Take the winds from a given distance behind the fireline, and set the distance in the namelist.
• Gradual ignition from a point or a line without limitation on the initial radius. See discussion.
• Real test problem with real fire data at both fine and coarse resolution.
• Adding a canopy fire model for both passive (colocated) and running (not colocated with surface fire) canopy fire.
• Output of emissions products into WRF for visualization of smoke transport and dispersion.
• Connection of emissions products with WRF-Chem for online simulation of the evolution of smoke.
• Add fuel models & fuel modeling schemes.

In progress

When you start on an item from the wish list, please move the item here and add a link to the branch where you work on it.

• Better quadrature for fuel left
  • The quadrature is done separately on 4 smaller cells per fire cell. The interpolation of time from ignition to the smaller cells should take into consideration the case when some of the nodes interpolated from are ignited and some are not.

1. REDIRECT Template:WRF-Fire-branch

• • The current scheme is second order accurate when all 4 corners of a fire mesh cell are on fire, and exact when all 4 corners are not on fire. In the case when only some of the 4 corners are on fire, the only requirements are that the transition when nodes ignite is continuous and monotonous. In that case, the scheme may not be very accurate. A better scheme would be accurate in more cases and have natural invariance properties. branch jm2/mkim

This affects the amount of heat output from the cell in the timesteps when the fireline crosses the cell.

• Input to the fire model the gradient rather than terrain height. This will allow the gradient to be smoothly interpolated in preprocessing in the WPS or in setting up ideal cases. No artificial terrain smoothing is needed. The current scheme interpolates terrain height linearly, and if the mesh the terrain is interpolated from is much coarser than the fire mesh, this results in gradient jumps along the terrain mesh lines. Then, the fire spread rate jumps along the terrain mesh lines. See discussion. branch jm2/grad.
• Read the topography from a file in an ideal run. Fix/extend surface initialization in ideal cases to allow for defining surface properties like roughness, ground temperature, albedo etc., required by soil models and radiation codes. See discussion. branch adamko/surface
• Support hyperbolic vertical mesh grading in ideal run not only exponential. branch adamko/surface
• Set up fireflux text case branch jc
• Paper on the fire model in WRF-Fire.
• Paper on numerical methods in WRF-Fire
• Data assimilation

Done

Move the item here when done and add a link to the contributor's last commit before the merge into master. Links to major milestone events can be also added to the timeline.

2005

• Standalone fire model from CAWFE rewritten in F90 by Ned Patton received Mar 31 2005

2006

• John Michalakes writes specs for support of fire grids in WRF Feb 6 2006

2007

• Alternative implementation of fire grid in nested domains in WRF by Jon Beezley Feb 29 2007
• Jon started git repository from initial WRF+tracers code from Ned Patton
• Matlab prototype of level set method working Aug 30, 2007
• Imported a modular rewrite with a new standalone level set code
• WRF+level set coupled code working
• Paper with description of WRF-Fire and data assimilation posted on arXiv, ignition from namelist

2008

• Change nodes on the fire mesh from corners to centers
• WPS support
• OpenMP support
• Cleanup, delete standalone driver and the tracers fire code
• Landfire data conversion

2009

• Distributed memory (halos)
• Approved for public release
• Set up nested ideal case
• WPS support for fire grid and nesting
• Paper with description of the code published in June 2009
• Add namelist.fire to define fuel categories
• Interpolate in the computation of fuel_left locally to save stack memory
• 3D visualization in Matlab
• Visualization in VisTrails and Supercomputing 2009 Demo, Nov 15 2009

2010

• Support for WRF restart
• Control in namelist the initial atmosphere perturbation (bubble) in ideal run, off by default. See discussion.
• Version released with WRF 3.2 Apr 2 2010
• Fetch high-resolution geogrid data automatically
• Walking line ignition (as the fireman walks igniting the fire)
• Visualization in VAPOR,

Back burner

Items from the wish list that are around for a long time or may never be done should be moved here.

See also

• List of WRF-Fire pages

External links

• Branches and recent activity in the repository
• Data assimilation seminar to do list