Author(s) :

Eugene Yang.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

Climate change resulted in an increase in wildfire frequency and severity, with hotter climates and drier weather. Along with the wildfire frequency, there is a growing need for wildfire prevention systems and infrastructure. Fire growth models (FGMs) assist in predicting fire behaviors and developing effective countermeasures. This paper reviews various FGMs including Fire Area Simulator (FARSITE), Prometheus, and Cell2Fire, analyzing their methods and doing comparative analysis on their computations and practical uses. Prometheus and FARSITE rely on wave-propagation, yielding results that closely align with real-life wildfire cases. Each model is tailored to its respective region: Prometheus for Canada and FARSITE in the United States. Accuracy is highly dependent on quality of data, particularly wind and fuel maps, which is why they are noticeably less accurate in testing in other regions. Cell2Fire is much faster compared to Prometheus and FARSITE due to its use of cellular automata for faster parallel computing, however with slightly reduced accuracy.