Integrating dynamic wildland fire position input with a community fire spread simulation: A case study of the 2018 Camp Fire

Abstract

Wildland fire simulation models can be used to inform wildfire risk assessment and mitigation strategies. However, existing models tend to simulate fire spread only inside the wildland or the wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities, but not in both. As a result, there is a need to integrate methodologies to enable seamless simulations of events that ignite in the wildland and continue spreading both across the wildland and inside WUI communities. This paper investigates a systematic methodology to provide a WUI fire spread model with the capacity to assimilate dynamic wildland fire position inputs. The paper uses the streamlined wildland-urban interface fire tracing (SWUIFT) model to simulate WUI fire spread, weather radar data to track the fire line inside the wildland, and the 2018 Camp Fire event as a case study. The work proposes and evaluates a methodology based on a ‘Three-Domain Solution’ (Wildland, Transition, Community) for a smooth fire transition between wildland and community settings. Alternative approaches are examined to describe the boundaries of a Community Domain for simulation purposes. Existing WUI definitions are studied, and considering the analysis results, a non-WUI neighborhood-based housing density (NBHD) method is proposed. This work establishes a systematic approach for a unified wildland-WUI fire simulation.