We are developing a wildland fire model based on semi-empirical relations that estimate the rate of spread of a surface fire and post-frontal heat release, coupled with WRF, the Weather Research and Forecasting atmospheric model. A level set method identifies the fire front. Data are assimilated using both amplitude and position corrections using a morphing ensemble Kalman filter. We will use thermal images of a fire for observations that will be compared to synthetic image based on the model state.
@article{arxiv.0802.1615,
title = {Real-Time Data Driven Wildland Fire Modeling},
author = {Jonathan D. Beezley and Soham Chakraborty and Janice L. Coen and Craig C. Douglas and Jan Mandel and Anthony Vodacek and Zhen Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.1615},
year = {2009}
}