Wildfires and Climate Change: Physics-Based Modelling of Fire Spread in a Changing World

Fire has long been a ubiquitous and essential part of the global environment, as many ecosystems and societal life fundamentally depend on fire.

Despite this, we still lack a fundamental theory of fire spread, which becomes crucial in a changing world if we want to understand and predict the occurrence of uncontrolled fires.

Uncontrolled fires are a global phenomena that are becoming commonplace as changes in moisture and local temperature driven by climate change affect local fuel properties and ecosystems.

As we construct more housing and industry in areas that were previously wildlands, the Wildland-Urban Interface becomes more critical as wildfires now affect infrastructure and urban systems.The societal, scientific, and engineering problem of uncontrolled fires is a complex one: it requires the harmonisation of both engineering and environmental science methods, including combustion engineering, real time modelling, data assimilation and management, and the development of techniques that can adequately support the needs of fire management.

The aim of this proposal is ambitious, but essential to understand and predict the occurrence of uncontrolled fires: We need a fundamental physical model to understand the process of fire spread. It needs to be validated, and it needs to work for all conditions and fuel types.

We will develop this physical model focusing on three different methods, in parallel:i) Study fire across temporal and spatial scales to understand changing fire regimes, including vegetation dynamics. ii) Understanding of fire on multiple scales will help with scaling up from small-scale fine mesh models to much larger grid sizes. iii) Integrate the effect of smouldering combustion into modelling of fire spread.

The scientific outcomes of our work will ensure that there is a fundamental step-change in the approach of modelling wildfire ignition and spread, with the proposed methodology and tools then widely available for scientists to adapt.