Development of Forest Fire Spread Simulation on Up and Down Slope

Abstract

Recently, forest fires have caused a serious hazard to forest management and the forest environment in Korea. The development of an accurate forest fire spread prediction method could contribute to supporting fire control operations. A forest fire can rapidly develop into a large–scale forest fire due to topographic characteristics such as slope. Since the development of the GIS system, analyzing a slope on a large scale has become relatively straightforward. However, the legacy algorithm used for calculating slope is problematic as it is not able to distinguish the spread rate between the upslope and the down slope. Accordingly, in order to solve this problem, a comparative analysis is carried out in this study on the forest fire spread rate for upslope and down slope. When a slope in simulation was calculated using a supposed algorithm, a supple method was used that applied a direction for the spread of forest fire. The proposed method was able to calculate spread rate more accurately. Furthermore, the spread rate of forest fire could be analyzed on each slope, since the method classified upslope (+) and down slope (–). Consequently, the proposed method is able to be used to effectively support the attack of forest fire by providing accurate predictions of fire spread.