WRF-Fire
WRF-Fire combines the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) with a fire spread model, implemented by the level set method.
WRF-Fire is written in Fortran 90 following WRF coding conventions. It is called from WRF as a subroutine and 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 run independently without an atmosphere model by substituting its own main program and linking with stubs that replace the WRF subroutines called, though this capability has fallen behind at the moment.
Distribution
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.
Howtos
Current versions
The current version of WRF-Fire is based on WRF 3.1. WRF included a version of WRF-Fire quietly since WRF 3.1.1 in Summer 2009. The official, supported release of WRF-Fire with WRF is planned with WRF 3.2 in late March 2010.
To get the latest version directly from the development repository, see How to run WRF-Fire. This version also contains a number of additional tools such as Matlab scripts for visualization.