WRF-Fire

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WRF-Fire combines the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) with a surface fire behavior model. Semi-empirical formulas calculate the rate of spread of the fire line, the interface between burning and unignited fuel, based on fuel properties, wind velocities from WRF, and terrain slope. This interface is implemented by the level set method. The heat release from the fire line as well as post-frontal heat release feeds back into WRF dynamics, affecting the simulated weather in the vicinity of the fire. WRF-Fire is written in Fortran 90 following WRF coding conventions. It is integrated as a physics option, called from WRF as a subroutine. It calls WRF libraries for utilities such as I/O and communication between MPI processes. WRF-Fire executes on a part of the domain, called a tile (in WRF nomenclature). All communication between the tiles is in the caller; thus, one time step requires multiple calls to WRF-Fire. WRF-Fire can also be run independently without an atmosphere model by substituting its own main program and linking with stubs that replace the WRF subroutines called, although this capability has fallen behind at the moment and is not physically meaningful.

Distribution

WRF-Fire is public domain software, released under the WRF public domain notice and disclaimer.

Current development version

This version also contains a number of additional tools such as Matlab scripts for visualization. See How to get WRF-Fire and How to run WRF-Fire for installation instructions.

• Source code repository

From WRF release

WRF-Fire is included in WRF 3.2, released on April 2, 2010.

• WRF download

File format

All input, output, and restart files (with the complete model state) are in NetCDF format.

Programming language and environments

Fortran 90 with CPP preprocessor. Part of the WRF code is generated by C programs from a description in the registry.

Documentation

Technical description

• Description of the fire scheme in WRF describes the algorithms and software structure of WRF-Fire. It is intended to become a chapter in the WRF Technical Note in the future. The description is based on sections Fireline propagation model and Level set-based wildland file model in Jan Mandel, Jonathan D. Beezley, Janice L. Coen, Minjeong Kim, Data Assimilation for Wildland Fires: Ensemble Kalman filters in coupled atmosphere-surface models, IEEE Control Systems Magazine 29, Issue 3, June 2009, 47-65. Preprint at arXiv:0712.3965, December 2007.

User's guides

• User's guide, updated continuously with the software as distributed by the developers.
• The WRF-Fire pages on this wiki, updated continuously.
• The WRF-Fire chapter in the WRF 3.2 User's guide for the version frozen in the WRF release.

Support

Email support

Questions regarding WRF-Fire can be sent to wrffirehelp@openwfm.org. This email address is forwarded to the developers. When you write us, please:

• Identify the version (WRF version if from the WRF release, the first line of the output of git log if your code is from the git repository)
• Make sure you test the issue first on the code exactly as you have received it and the code version is up to date. If you obtained the code by git (highly recommended) as described in How to get WRF-Fire,
  • git diff should return no output
  • please verify that you are on the latest commit on the master branch from the repository.
• Recompile the code from scratch after typing clean -a first
• Send us sufficient information to identify and reproduce the problem if needed (output of wrf compilation, namelist.input, output from the run)

Mailing list

For further support, WRF-Fire announcements, questions, and discussions, please subscribe to the WRF-Fire mailing list at http://mailman.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/wrf-fire.

Wiki

We welcome contributions and discussion on the pages of this wiki. Please see the Main Page for How to get an account. The WRF-Fire wish list is recommended for requests and Talk:WRF-Fire wish list for further discussions regarding future developments of WRF-Fire.

Publications

Description of WRF-Fire

• Jan Mandel, Jonathan D. Beezley, Janice L. Coen, Minjeong Kim, Data Assimilation for Wildland Fires: Ensemble Kalman filters in coupled atmosphere-surface models, IEEE Control Systems Magazine 29, Issue 3, June 2009, 47-65. Also available as arXiv:0712.3965, December 2007.

• Jonathan Beezley, Janice Coen, Jan Mandel, John Michalakes, and Ned Patton, WRF-Fire: A Wildland Fire Behavior module for WRF, presentation at the NCAR Mesoscale Prediction Group meeting, November 24, 2008

• Kara Yedinak, J. L. Coen, and B. Lamb, WRF-Fire: A fire-atmosphere dynamics module for air quality modeling, The 89th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (Phoenix, AZ), 11th Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry, Poster JP 1.10, January 2009.

Other related papers and presentations

• Jan Mandel, Jonathan D. Beezley, and Volodymyr Y. Kondratenko, Fast Fourier Transform Ensemble Kalman Filter with Application to a Coupled Atmosphere-Wildland Fire Model, MS2010, in print. Preprint arXiv:1001.1588

• K M Yedinak, B K Lamb, J L Coen, Sensitivity Analysis and Application of WRF-Fire, poster at the session A35: Wildfire Dynamics: Observations and Modeling of Fire-Atmosphere Interactions, American Geophysical Union Fall 2009 Meeting. Listed in the Scientific program at p. 344.

Contributors

• Janice Coen (NCAR) developed physics components of the fire model, which is the same as in CAWFE (Coen (2005) and Clark et al. (2004))
• Ned Patton (NCAR) ported the fire code from (Clark et al., 2004) and interfaced it with WRF (Patton and Coen, 2004).
• Minjeong Kim and Jan Mandel (University of Colorado Denver) have identified a version of the level set metod suitable for fire spread, and developed a prototype Matlab code.
• Jan Mandel (University of Colorado Denver), has been leading the WRF-Fire software development. He has implemented the fire spread by the level set method as a parallel WRF-compliant code with assistance from Jonathan Beezley and Minjeong Kim, starting from Ned Patton's WRF interface and using the subroutines for the spread rate computation and the insertion of heat fluxes into the atmosphere from CAWFE.
• John Michalakes (formerly NCAR, now NREL) modified WRF to support refined grids (submesh) for the fire code.
• Jonathan Beezley (University of Colorado Denver) has further modified WRF to support the fire software, provided the software engineering infrastructure, has set up and maintains the git repository, maintains synchronization with WRF changes, and developed the modified version of WPS for WRF with the fire model to enable the use of real data.
• Volodymyr Kondratenko (University of Colorado Denver) has improved memory handing in the computation of remaining fuel.
• Adam Kochanski (University of Utah) has contributed variable atmospheric bubble initialization and suggested the walking line ignition.
• Kara Yedinak (Washington State University) has pointed out possible improvements in fire initialization. See discussion

See also

• List of WRF-Fire pages
• WRF-Fire development notes
• Wildfire modeling
• WRF-Fire at servinghistory.com

External links

• WRF users page with links to download and documentation
• WRF-ARW Users Guide v. 3.2 (direct link)
• Technical description of WRF-ARW v. 3 (direct link)
• Graph of the commits in the repository