Cell2Fire: A Cell Based Forest Fire Growth Model

Abstract: Cell2Fire is a new cell-based forest and wildland landscape fire growth simulator that is open-source and exploits parallelism to support the modelling of fire growth cross large spatial and temporal scales in a timely manner. The fire environment is characterized by partitioning the landscape into a large number of cells each of which has specified fuel, weather, fuel moisture and topography attributes. Fire spread within each cell is assumed to be elliptical and governed by spread rates predicted by a fire spread model such as the Canadian Forest Fire Behavior Prediction (FBP) System. The simulator includes powerful statistical and graphical output and spatial analysis features to facilitate the display and analysis of projected fire growth. We validated Cell2Fire by using it to predict the growth of real and realistic hypothetical fires, comparing our fire growth predictions with those produced by the state-of-the-art Prometheus fire growth simulator. Cell2Fire is structured to facilitate its use for predicting the growth of individual fires or embedding it in landscape management simulation models. It can be used to produce probabilistic fire scar predictions by allowing for uncertainty concerning the basic spread rate predictions and uncertain weather scenarios that might drive their growth.