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.
From WRF release
WRF-Fire is included in WRF 3.2, released on April 2, 2010.
Contact
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 logif 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 diffshould 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 -afirst - 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. Preprint at arXiv:0712.3965, December 2007.
- 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.
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, submitted. 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 developed the physical fire model, which is the same as in CAWFE (Coen (2005) and Clark et al. (2004))
- Ned Patton (Patton and Coen, 2004), ported the earlier fire code from (Clark et al., 2004) and interfaced it with WRF.
- Jan Mandel is leading the WRF-Fire software development. He wrote the fire component in WRF-Fire using the WRF interface from Net Patton's code and the spread rate computation from CAWFE, with advice from Janice Coen and assistance from Jonathan Beezley and Minjeong Kim.
- John Michalakes modified WRF to support refined grids (submesh) for the fire code.
- Jonathan Beezley has further modified WRF to support the fire software, provided the software engineering infrastructure, and developed the modified version of WPS for WRF with the fire model.
- Volodymyr Kondratenko has improved memory handing in computation of fuel left
- Adam Kochanski has contributed variable atmospheric bubble initialization.
See also
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)