Wildland fires continue to pose risk to lives and property and thus practitioners and scientists continue to work to gain better understanding and ability to predict their behavior.  Simultaneously, wildland fire decision makers are working towards more proactive approaches to managing the risk of wildfire, such as fuels treatments and prescribed fire.  Executing such measures requires the ability to explore the ramification of such treatments as well as ensure that prescribed fires will meet their objectives.  Experiments and observations have demonstrated that the two-way feedbacks between fires and atmosphere play critical roles in determining how fires spread or if they spread.  Advancements in computing and numerical modeling have generated new opportunities for the use of models that couple process-based wildfire models to atmospheric hydrodynamics models.  These process-based coupled fire/atmosphere models, which simulate critical processes such as heat transfer, buoyancy-induced flows and vegetation aerodynamic drag, are not practical for operational faster-than-real-time fire prediction due to their computational and data requirements.  However, these process-based coupled fire-atmosphere models make it possible to represent many of the fire-atmosphere feedbacks and thus have the potential to complement experiments, add perspective to observations, bridge between idealized-fire scenarios and more complex and realistic landscape fire scenarios, allow for sensitivity analysis that is impractical through observations and pose new hypothesis that can be tested experimentally.  Additionally, coupled wildfire/atmosphere modeling opens new possibilities for understanding the sometime counterintuitive impacts of fuel management and exploring the implications of various prescribed fire tactics.  Certainly, there need to be continued efforts to validate the results from these numerical investigations, but, even so, they suggest relationships, interactions and phenomenology that should be considered in the context of the interpretation of observations, design of fire behavior experiments, development of new operational models and even risk management.  Although coupled wildfire/atmosphere modeling started by leveraging high performance computing basis, the understanding that has been developed through initial efforts is now enabling the development of faster running tools.  Both faster-running and high fidelity coupled wildfire/atmosphere tools have the opportunity to begin supporting proactive decisions in different ways.

Rod Linn, PhD.

Expert in solving and modeling problems involving complex thermal, mechanical, and fluid dynamics systems, including wildfire behavior modeling.