Coupling Wind Dynamics into a DDDAS Forest Fire Propagation Prediction System

Natural hazards are significant problems that every year cause important loses around the world. A good prediction of the behavior of the hazards is a crucial issue to fight against them and to minimize the damages. The models that represent these phenomena need several input parameters and in many cases, such parameters are difficult to know or even to estimate in a real scenario. So, a methodology based on the DDDAS paradigm was developed to calibrate the input parameters according to real observations of the behavior and evolution of the hazard. Such calibrated parameters are then used to provide an improved prediction for the next time interval. This methodology was tested on Forest Fire Propagation Prediction with significant results. The developed methodology takes the fire behavior and propagation during a time interval and then searches for the values of the input parameters that best reproduce the propagation of the fire during that interval. Several Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods were applied to carry out this search as fast as possible. The values of the parameters that best reproduce the behavior of the fire were then used as input parameters to predict the propagation during the next time interval. These parameters were considered constant during both time intervals and a single value for each parameter was used for the calibrating process and for the prediction stage. This methodology fits on the DDDAS paradigm since the prediction is dynamically driven by the system evolution. However, there are several parameters that are not constant through time, but they may vary dynamically. In the case of forest fires, a typical example is the wind. In some cases, when the time interval is short an average value for the wind can be a feasible value, but when the time interval is longer, in most cases, a single value cannot represent the variability of the wind. We can estimate wind behavior applying some complementary model. In this work, we are going a step further considering the dynamic behavior of such parameters. We propose an extension of the existing prediction scheme that takes into account the dynamically changing parameters by coupling a weather prediction system on a DDDAS Forest Fire Propagation Prediction system. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.