A new paradigm for forest fire spread prediction: Faster decisions at high resolution

Climate change has led to a significant increase in the number of wildfire events and their severity. To mitigate their impact, it is necessary to be able to make quick decisions according to the fire behavior. In order to assist on these decisions, we rely on forest fire spread simulators. However, one of the main problems associated to these tools lies in finding the appropriate balance between execution time and simulation resolution, which has a direct impact on the accuracy of the simulated results. Simulations at high resolution are computational intensive in terms of execution time and, therefore, they are not used for real-time evolution forecast. FARSITE forest fire spread simulator has arisen as the most recognized simulation tool based on the Elliptical Wave Propagation (EWP) scheme. However, its main drawback consists of high execution times due the perimeter reconstruction algorithm used. In this paper, we propose an alternative algorithm to perform the reconstruction process based on the α -shapealgorithm. The proposed algorithm, Boundary α -shape algorithm, has been design bearing in mind that it could be easily parallelized. The obtained results when executing FARSITE by exchanging its reconstruction algorithm by the new one highlights that the Boundary α -shape allows a notable execution time reduction.