Quantifying rare events in wildfires in presence of atmospheric waves

Music City Center 

Forest fires generate burning pieces of vegetation, called firebrands, and launch them into the air through columns of gas produced by the fire. After lofting into the air, firebrands are taken away by the ambient wind. At the time of landing, these burning firebrands can start separate fires away from the original fire. The secondary fires are called spot fires and the entire process is referred to as spotting. Quantifying the probability of spot fires at a large distance remains a major challenge in forecasting and managing wildfires. In this talk, we first show that atmospheric waves can significantly increase the spotting distance. Then, using the concept of inertial manifolds and large deviation theory, we introduce a mathematical method that quantifies the probability distribution of such rare extreme spot fires.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Algorithms for Threat Detection (ATD) program, through the award DMS-2220548.

Rare events; Wildfires; Uncertainty Quantification; Atmospheric Flow