Project Title: A Method for Prediction of Surface Fire Propagation Probability Based on Stochastic Automaton Model

Principal Investigator: Zhu Jiping

Funding Source: The General Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China

Project Period: 2010-2012

Abstract:

Forest surface-fire spread modeling is a hot topic of forest fire research. One of the problems with existing models is that the ensemble average values of the environmental condition parameters are used to predict fire spread, without considering the local changes of the parameters. The project intends to develop a stochastic cellular automata model to predict the risk of fire spread. At first, to describe the local changes of each environmental condition, a series of models for characterizing the random probability distributions of the condition parameters will be established, based on the field observations that will be carried out in the Northeast China and the South China. Then, by the laboratory investigations, a surface-fire spread model will be advanced, considering the random changes of the environmental conditions including fuel load, moisture content, wind velocity, terrain slope, etc. And next, a stochastic algorithm based on the Monte Carlo Method will be developed to achieve a stochastic cellular automata model for predict the fire spread probability, which can be defined as the probability of fire propagation to each cell in the forest area.