Section: New Results

Fire application

Model evaluation for fire propagation

Participants : Hajer Ayed, Vivien Mallet, Jean-Baptiste Fillipi [CNRS] , Bahaa Nader [University of Corsica] .

In the field of forest fires risk management, important challenges exist in terms of people and goods preservation. Answering to strong needs from different actors (firefighters, foresters), researchers focus their efforts to develop operational decision support system tools that may forecast wildfire behavior. This requires the evaluation of models performance, but currently, simulation errors are not sufficiently qualified and quantified. As the main objective is to realize a decision support system, it is required to establish robust forecast evaluations. In the context of the ANR project IDEA, the evaluation of model simulations has been started with a bibliographical review, the implementation of a series of forecast scores and the definition of a series of ideal cases where some classical scores may fail (especially in taking into account the dynamics).

In addition, we consider that the proper evaluation of a model requires to apply it to a large number of fires – instead of carrying out a fine tuning on just one fire. We implemented a software to simulate a large number of fires (from the Prométhée database, http://www.promethee.com/ ) with the simulation model ForeFire (CNRS/University of Corsica) and to evaluate the results with our error measures. One simulation requires mainly the following data: the ignition point, the ground elevation, the vegetation cover and the wind field. See the illustration of Fig. 13 .

Figure 13. Fire simulation (using ForeFire) in red elevated contour, and observation (from Prométhée) of the burned area in filled red contour, for a 2003 fire near San-Giovanni-di-Moriani (Corsica).