An interoperable fire behavior model for coupling with atmospheric models: The Community Fire Behavior model

This presentation will provide an overview of the Community Fire Behavior model (CFBM, Jimenez y Munoz et al, 2024). Fire behavior models allow for an explicit representation of the fire progression accounting for feedback between the atmosphere and fires. The CFBM has been designed to facilitate coupling with different atmospheric models. To this end, we rely on modern software engineering standards and the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) libraries (https://github.com/NCAR/fire_behavior). In its current version (v0.2.0), CFBM closely follows the methods of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with fire extensions (WRF-Fire). This allowed us to ensure the adequacy of our implementations. The CFBM has been implemented in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Unified Forecast System (UFS) and we are in the process of coupling the model to WRF. The results from idealized fire simulations, and the consistency shown between UFS-CFBM and WRF-Fire, as well as WRF-CFBM and WRF-Fire, were the starting point for our ongoing extensions. This includes accounting for the impact of the fuel moisture content on smoke emissions from wildland fires. Our strategy to enhance the evolution of fire emissions for air quality systems will be also outlined. The results obtained so far and the interoperability of the model, that allows for coupling to other atmospheric models, should facilitate its adoption; which would foster collaborative developments to improve fundamental understanding of fire-atmosphere processes including wildland fire impacts on atmospheric composition.

 

Jimenez y Munoz, P.A., M. Frediani, M. Eghdami, D. Rosen, M. Kavulich, and T.W. Juliano, 2024: The Community Fire Behavior model for coupled fire-atmosphere modeling: Implementation in the Unified Forecast System. Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss. Preprint.