” Modeling wildland fire behavior “

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWnfm6b7cq8

 

Abstract :

Understanding and anticipating wildland fire behavior are societal and environmental issues in the current context of climate change, which enhances the emergence of extreme wildfire events such as the 2019/2020 Southeast Australia megafires. Modeling their behavior raises a number of scientific issues due to the strong interactions between the atmosphere, vegetation and combustion on the one hand, due to the multiple sources of uncertainty related to the modeling assumptions and the intrinsic variability of the Earth system on the other hand.

My presentation will report on my research activities into the development and evaluation of a wildland fire reanalysis strategy that is able to infer more realistic biophysical and meteorological conditions, and to reconstruct a detailed chronology of events. The cornerstones of this strategy are a front data assimilation approach, and ensemble coupled fire/atmosphere simulations based on MesoNH in large-eddy simulation mode. Emphasis will be made throughout the presentation on the actual limitations of modeling and observational data, and on the possible ways for improvement. Emphasis will also be made on the scientific exploitation of detailed fire behavior simulations to inform larger scale modeling systems that are needed to better understand how the fire element impacts some components of the Earth system.

This work is positioned in an interdisciplinary framework at the interface between meteorology, climate sciences, ecology, combustion, applied mathematics, and data sciences.

Jury :

Ronan Fablet – MT Atlantique –  Referee

Albert Simeoni – WPI – Referee

Solène Turquety – LMD – Referee

: Gianpaolo Balsamo – ECMWF – Member

Anthony Collin – Université de Lorraine – Member

Fleur Couvreux – CNRM – Member

Céline Mari – LAERO – Marraine