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.

Get rid of 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. See discussion.
Merge with WRF 3.2
Modify WPS to compute terrain gradient at data resolution and interpolate it to the fire mesh.
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, fine resolution and sharp terrain gradients
Canopy fire
- Canopy fire collocated with ground fire is easy. A separate canopy fire would be harder.
Output to WRF-Chem
- Output of the combustion products into WRF is also needed to visualize smoke.

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.

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.

2007

Initial WRF 2 + fire by tracers code as received
Imported a new standalone level set code
WRF+level set coupled code
paper with description of the code 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.

External links

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