FIRE SPREAD IN NATURAL FUEL: COMPUTATIONAL ASPECTS

The computational aspects of fire in fuel (mostly popularized under the nickname “forest fires”) have been studied through discretized approaches (including percolative cellular automata), partly as a counterpart of ongoing experiments under idealized conditions (simple fuel types, slope or wind controlled spread). Another, substantial body of computer intensive work, has to do with the use of digitized satellite imagery to duplicate or forecast fire scenarios in real topographical situations. Although this has been pursued by discrete automata evolution, a large amount of the more recent studies uses continuous spread algorithms.