Pixel-Level Statistical Analyses of Prescribed Fire Spread

Abstract

Wildland fire dynamics is a complex turbulent dimensional process. Cellular automata (CA) is an efficient tool to predict fire dynamics, but the main parameters of the method are challenging to estimate. To overcome this challenge, we compute statistical distributions of the key parameters of a CA model using infrared images from controlled burns. Moreover, we apply this analysis to different spatial scales and compare the experimental results to a simple statistical model. By performing this analysis and making this comparison, several capabilities and limitations of CA are revealed.