WRF-Fire development notes

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.

Merge additional changes made independently in the WRF 3.3 release.
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.
Take current time in ESMF form for ignition time computation to support adaptive time steps and ignition in restart runs. See discussion.
Generate input data for WFDS.
Parametrize ignition startup. See discussion.
Input fuel moisture from the WRF surface model.
High-order ENO and WENO level-set methods. Or, maybe better discontinuous Galerkin.

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.

Ignition from a given fire perimeter, with atmosphere and fuel consumption spin-up, by specifying ignition times. See discussion.
Generate KML files for visualization in Google Earth. See discussion
Real test problem with real fire data at both fine and coarse resolution.
Better quadrature for fuel left: 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.

Set up fireflux test case: branch fireflux, submitted abstract
Data assimilation
Dynamically determine midflame height and interpolate the wind there. See discussion.
A standalone driver that is independent of WRF with I/O as WRF-compatible NetCDF files. branch jm2/driver_wrf See How to run the standalone fire model in WRF-Fire.

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

Change nodes on the fire mesh from corners to centers Feb 10 2008
WPS support 3 Aug 2008
MPI support Oct 23 2008
Cleanup, delete standalone driver and the CAWFE tracer code Nov 18 2008
Landfire data conversion Dec 15 2008

2009

Distributed memory (halos) Jan 7 2009
Approved by UCD and NCAR for public release Mar 17 2009
Set up nested ideal case May 4 2009
WPS support for fire grid and nesting 7 May 2009
Paper with a description of the WRF-Fire and data assimilation published in June 2009
Add namelist.fire to define fuel categories 20 Sep 2009
Interpolate in the computation of fuel_left locally to save stack memory Oct 10 2009
3D visualization in Matlab Nov 3 2009
Visualization in VisTrails and Supercomputing 2009 Demo, Nov 15 2009

2010

Support for WRF restart 16 Jan 2010
Control in namelist the initial atmosphere perturbation (bubble) in ideal run, off by default. 27 Feb 2010 See discussion.
Version 19 Feb 2010 released with WRF 3.2 Apr 2 2010
Hyperbolic vertical mesh grading in ideal run not only exponential. Mar 9 2010
Fetch high-resolution geogrid data automatically Apr 27 2010
Walking line ignition (as the fireman walks igniting the fire) 23 May 2010
Basic visualization in VAPOR. May 26 2010
Merge git repository with WRF and WPS 3.2 Jun 12 2010 announcement
Interpolate the terrain gradient to the fire mesh instead of differencing an interpolated terrain height. Jun 14 2010 See discussion.
Replace includes for fire parameter arrays by a derived type. Jun 14 2010. See discussion.
Resurrected a standalone driver for the fire code that is independent of WRF for diagnostics. 20 Jun 2010 See discussion.
Surface initialization in ideal runs allows for defining surface properties like roughness, ground temperature, albedo etc., required by soil models and radiation codes. See discussion. Jul 6 2010
Reading from a file in an ideal run: land use, fuel categories, topography Jul 22 2010
Vertical wind profiles in Matlab for diagnostics Sun Jul 25 2010
Interpolate wind to a given height (the same for all fuels) from log profile, and set the height as fire_wind_height in the namelist. Sep 11 2010, added wind reduction factor to midflame height 16 Sep 2010
Rate of spread diagnostics 16 Sep 2010.
Support for NetCDF 4 output files based on HDF5 16 Oct 2010.
Subscale ignition with zero initial radius. See discussion. Nov 2, 2010

2011

Vertical log interpolation of the wind to different heights for different fuels. See discussion. 24 Feb 2011
Reference paper on WRF-Fire published in GMDD March 9, 2011.
Ignition time interpolation for better quadrature of fuel left March 16, 2011. See discussion.
Added independent adjustment factors of base spread rate, wind correction, and slope correction to fuel description Mar 23, 2011
Perimeter ignition from specified ignition times on the whole domain, allowing for atmosphere and fuel consumption spin-up. March 24, 2011 in ideal run. See discussion.
Base and backing spread rate decoupled by changes made independently in NCAR's WRF repository.
WRF-Fire based on Nov 20, 2010 with bug fix Jan 17, 2011 released with WRF 3.3 Apr 6, 2011.

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.

External links