A Level-set Algorithm for Simulating Wildfire Spread

Abstract

Level-set approaches are efficient and versatile methods for solving interface tracking problems and have been used in recent years to describe wildland fire propagation. Being based on an Eulerian description of the spread problem, their numerical implementation offers improved computational agility and better portability to parallel computing environments with respect to vector-based simulators. The use of a continuous representation of the fire perimeter in place of the binary formulation used in Cellular Automata avoids the commonly observed distortion of the fire shape. This work presents an algorithm for fire-spread simulation based on a level-set formulation. The results are compared to the ones obtained by two well-known Cellular Automata simulators under homogeneous conditions, and to the ones given by a well-know vector-based fire-spread simulator under realistic slope and wind conditions. According to this work, the level-set approach provides better results, in terms of accuracy, at a much reduced computational cost.