WRF-Fire development notes

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Revision as of 13:39, 21 December 2010 by Jmandel (talk | contribs) (→‎2008)
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This page tracks activity in the WRF-Fire and related software development. All members of the community 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.
  • Support WRF-NMM in addition to WRF-ARW
  • Take the winds from a given distance behind the fireline, and set the distance in the namelist.
  • Add 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, esp. Scott-Burgan categories. Input the same fuel description files as BehavePlus and FARSITE. Do not reinvent the wheel and use the Fire SDK in some way.
  • Fix ignition time computation in case of adaptive time steps. See discussion.
  • Generate input data for WFDS.
  • Attenuate winds close to ignition point/line to model fire startup. See discussion.

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.
  • Generate KML files for visualization in Google Earth. See discussion
  • Real test problem with real fire data at both fine and coarse resolution.
  • Ignition of an observed fire perimeter, with atmosphere and fuel consumption spin-up. See discussion. branch jm2/ign
  • 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. branch jm2/fuel branch vk/test
    • 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 last commit branch vk/test
This affects the amount of heat output from the cell in the timesteps when the fireline crosses the cell.

Done, but needs documentation

  • 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. Jul 6 2010
  • Support hyperbolic vertical mesh grading in ideal run not only exponential. Mar 9 2010
  • Reading from a file in an ideal run: land use, fuel categories, topography Jul 22 2010
  • Take the winds from a given height (the same for all fuels), and set the height in the namelist. Sep 11 2010

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.

2004

  • Ned Patton and Janice Coen propose WRF-Fire in a workshop paper and formulate the fundamental principles of how to combine WRF with the fire spread model from CAWFE.

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
  • WRF-Fire development started from the WRF+CAWFE tracers code received from Ned Patton, Jon set up the git repository Jun 6 2007
  • Matlab prototype of level set method working Aug 30, 2007
  • Imported a modular rewrite with a new standalone level set code, called SFIRE Sep 5 2007
  • WRF+spread by level set coupled code working Nov 2 2007
  • Paper with description of WRF-Fire and data assimilation posted on arXiv Dec 24 2007
  • Ignition controlled from namelist Dec 24 2007

2008

2009

2010

Back burner

Items from the wish list that are around for a long time or may never be done should be moved here.
  • Convert ignition namelist variables into arrays for multiple ignitions.
  • Vertically interpolate the wind to different heights for different fuels.

See also

External links