Jean-Baptiste Filippi

University of Corsica Pascal Paoli · Laboratoire des Sciences Pour l’Environnement SPE - UMR 6134

This study aimed to assess fire–atmosphere interactions using the fully coupled Meso-NH–ForeFire system. We focused on the Pedrógão Grande wildfire (28,914 ha), which occurred in June 2017 and was one of the deadliest and most damaging fires in Portugal’s history. Two simulations (control and fully coupled fire–atmosphere) were performed for three...

Wildfire occurrence and behaviour are difficult to predict locally for the next day. In the present work, we propose relying on fire spread simulations to provide a fire danger index representative of the potential for fire spread that includes not only weather but also surrounding vegetation and orography. This is achieved using an artificial neur...

O período entre 2018 e 2022 mostrou-nos que o problema dos incêndios à escala global não está a diminuir, antes pelo contrário. Parece que as consequências das alterações climáticas já estão a afectar a ocorrência de incêndios florestais em várias partes do Mundo, de uma forma que só esperaríamos que acontecesse vários anos mais tarde. Em muitos pa...

O período entre 2018 e 2022 mostrou-nos que o problema dos incêndios à escala global não está a diminuir, antes pelo contrário. Parece que as consequências das alterações climáticas já estão a afectar a ocorrência de incêndios florestais em várias partes do Mundo, de uma forma que só esperaríamos que acontecesse vários anos mais tarde. Em muitos pa...

O período entre 2018 e 2022 mostrou-nos que o problema dos incêndios à escala global não está a diminuir, antes pelo contrário. Parece que as consequências das alterações climáticas já estão a afectar a ocorrência de incêndios florestais em várias partes do Mundo, de uma forma que só esperaríamos que acontecesse vários anos mais tarde. Em muitos pa...

To pursue the development and validation of coupled fire-atmosphere models, the wildland fire modeling community needs validation data sets with scenarios where fire-induced winds influence fire front behavior, and with high temporal and spatial resolution. Helicopter-borne infrared thermal cameras have the potential to monitor landscape-scale wild...

Volcanic eruptions can cause damage to land and people living nearby, generate high concentrations of toxic gases, and also create large plumes that limit observations and the performance of forecasting models that rely on these observations. This study investigates the use of micro- to meso-scale simulation to represent and predict the convection,...

Numerical simulation of wildland fire spread is useful to predict the locations that are likely to burn and to support decision in an operational context, notably for crisis situations and long-term planning. For short-term, the computational time of traditional simulators is too high to be tractable over large zones like a country or part of a cou...

Over the past couple of decades, the number of wildfires and area of land burned around the world has been steadily increasing, partly due to climatic changes and global warming. Therefore, there is a high probability that more people will be exposed to and endangered by forest fires. Hence there is an urgent need to design pervasive systems that e...

Simulation is used to predict the spread of a wildland fire across land in real-time. Nevertheless, the large uncertainties in these simulations must be quantified in order to provide better information to fire managers. Ensemble forecasts are usually applied for this purpose, with an input parameter distribution that is defined based on expert kno...

Numerical simulations of wildfire spread can provide support in deciding firefighting actions but their predictive performance is challenged by the uncertainty of model inputs stemming from weather forecasts, fuel parameterisation and other fire characteristics. In this study, we assign probability distributions to the inputs and propagate the unce...

The FireFlux II experiment was conducted in a tall grass prairie located in south-east Texas on 30 January 2013 under a regional burn ban and high fire danger conditions. The goal of the experiment was to better understand micrometeorological aspects of fire spread. The experimental design was guided by the use of a coupled fire-atmosphere model th...

The role of coastal macrophyte beds as a carbon sink is under debate. Various studies have provided global estimates of the carbon sequestration and stocks of macrophyte beds; however, the final fate of macrophyte debris exported from coastal beds remains uncertain, and must be determined in order to fully clarify the role of coastal vegetation as...

The Aullene fire devastated more than 3000 ha of Mediterranean maquis and pine forest in July 2009. The simulation of combustion processes, as well as atmospheric dynamics represents a challenge for such scenarios because of the various involved scales, from the scale of the individual flames to the larger regional scale. A coupled approach between...

This paper presents the Meso-NH model version 5.4. Meso-NH is an atmospheric non hydrostatic research model that is applied to a broad range of resolutions, from synoptic to turbulent scales, and is designed for studies of physics and chemistry. It is a limited-area model employing advanced numerical techniques, including monotonic advection scheme...

This paper presents the Meso-NH model version 5.4. Meso-NH is an atmospheric non hydrostatic research model that is applied to a broad range of resolutions, from synoptic to turbulent scales, and is designed for studies of physics and chemistry. It is a limited-area model employing advanced numerical techniques, including monotonic advection scheme...

The general objective of this research is to develop a prototype data-driven wildland fire spread simulator, called FIREFLY, using an ensemble-based data assimilation approach with the objective to forecast the location and speed of the fire. The specific focus of the present study is on evaluating the new features of FIREFLY at field scale in a co...

This paper presents a mathematical approach to model the effects of phenomena with random nature such as turbulence and fire-spotting into the existing wildfire simulators. The formulation proposes that the propagation of the fire-front is the sum of a drifting component (obtained from an existing wildfire simulator without turbulence and fire-spot...

A novel approach to study the propagation of fronts with random motion is presented. This approach is based on the idea to consider the motion of the front, split into a drifting part and a fluctuating part; the front position is also split correspondingly. In particular, the drifting part can be related to existing methods for moving interfaces, f...

This report presents a record of the discussions that took place during the workshop entitled “Towards Data-Driven Operational Wildfire Spread Modeling” held on January 12-13, 2015, at the University of California, San Diego. The workshop was organized as part of WIFIRE, a collaborative project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) bet...

This paper presents the evaluation of several fire propagation models using a large set of observed fires. The observation base is composed of 80 Mediterranean fire cases of different sizes, which come with the limited information available in an operational context (burned surface and approximative ignition point). Simulations for all cases are ca...

2014), Modeling the lava heat flux during severe effusive volcanic erup-tion: An important impact on surface air quality, Abstract The Reunion Island experienced its biggest eruption of Piton de la Fournaise Volcano during April 2007. Known as the eruption of the century, this event degassed more than 230 kt of SO 2 . Theses emissions led to import...

This paper presents the evaluation of several fire propagation models using a large set of observed fires. The observation base is composed of 80 Mediterranean fire cases of different sizes, which come with the limited information available in an operational context (burned surface and approximative ignition point). Simulations for all cases are ca...

Vegetation fires emit large amount of gases and aerosols which are detrimental to human health. Smoke exposure near and downwind of fires depends on the fire propagation, the atmospheric circulations and the burnt vegetation. A better knowledge of the interaction between wildfire and atmosphere is a primary requirement to investigate fire smoke and...

This paper provides a formal mathematical representation of a wildfire simulation, reviews the most common scoring methods using this formalism, and proposes new methods that are explicitly designed to evaluate a forest fire simulation from ignition to extinction. These scoring or agreement methods are tested with synthetic cases in order to expose...

Numerical simulations using a coupled approach between Meso-NH (Non-Hydrostatic) LES (Large Eddy Simulation) mesoscale atmospheric model and ForeFire wildland fire area simulator are compared to experimental data to assess the performance of the proposed coupled approach in predicting fine-scale properties of the dynamics of wildland fires. Meso-NH...

Vegetation fires emit large amount of gases and aerosols which are detrimental to human health. Smoke exposure near and downwind of fires depends on the fire propagation, the atmospheric circulations and the burnt vegetation. A better knowledge of the interaction between wildfire and atmosphere is a primary requirement to investigate fire smoke and...

The Reunion Island experienced its biggest eruption of Piton de la Fournaise Volcano during April 2007. Known as the eruption of the century, this event degassed more than 230 kt of SO 2. Theses emissions led to important health issues, accompanied by environmental and infrastructure degradations. This modeling study uses the mesoscale chemical mod...

Wildfires release significant amounts of trace gas and aerosols into the atmosphere. Firefighters are exposed to wildland fire smoke with adverse health effects. At larger scale, depending on meteorological conditions and fire characteristics, fire emissions can efficiently reduce air quality and visibility, even far away from emission sources. Unc...

A coupled approach between Meso-NH (Non-Hydrostatic) LES (Large Eddy Simulation) meso/microscale scale atmospheric model and ForeFire area simulator is proposed for predicting fine-scale properties of surface propagating systems. Originally developed for large wildland fire simulation (with or without atmospheric coupling) ForeFire has been extende...

Fire eruption is a significant threat to the safety of wildland fire fighters. Over the last few years, several accidents have caused important human losses. Generally, these fire fighters are surprised by the sudden acceleration of the head fire and they are not prepared for facing it. We characterize eruptive fires by an unexpected increasing of...

Forest fires release significant amounts of trace gases and aerosols into the atmosphere. Depending on meteorological conditions, fire emissions can efficiently reduce air quality and visibility, even far away from emission sources. In 2005, an arson forest fire burned nearly 700 ha near Lancon-de-Provence, southeast France. This paper explores the...

Wildfire is a constant risk due to its danger on both human and natural resources so modeling and simulation is an important tool to understand and forecast this phenomenon. A basic element of any simulation model is to define a way to store, compare and exchange observation and model results. Without a clear and standardized data structure, result...

This work presents the extension of a physical model for the spreading of surface fire at landscape scale. In previous work, the model was validated at laboratory scale for fire spreading across litters. The model was then modified to consider the structure of actual vegetation and was included in the wildland fire calculation system Forefire that...

Simulating interaction between forest fire and atmospheric processes requires a highly detailed and computationally intensive model. Processing this type of simulations in wildland fires forbids combustion-based models due to the large amount of fuels to be simulated in terms of quantity and diversity. In this paper, we propose an approach that cou...

This paper has presented three different applications of DEVS for the modelling of environmental systems. The choice has been made not to focus on actual implementation but on the overall presentation of the models, showing the benefits added by the DEVS formalism to the different paradigms used in these simulations. Depending on what is to be obse...

The objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of forest fire on air quality downwind of the burning region. Forest fire are known to be significant sources of gas and aerosols. Depending on the meteorological conditions, these emissions can efficiently perturb the air quality and visibility far away from the sources. This study presents the...

Simulation of moving interfaces, like a fire front usually requires the resolution of a large scale and detailed domain. Such computing needs involve the use of supercomputers to process the large amount of data and calculations. This limitation is mainly due to the fact that large scale of space or time is usually split into node, cells or matrice...

Drifting seaweeds plays a major role in areas where they are present. We describe a computer model that clarifies the roles of those seaweeds in relation to their transport using a particle back-tracking algorithm. Ocean currents data from the OFES model (OGCM for the Earth Simulator) is used to force trajectories backwards to find where particles...

This paper describes a simple physical model of the phenomenon of fire jumps. The model behaviour is developed using DEVS Formalism and simulated in Discrete Event fashion. The aim of this work is to be able to simulate this phenomenon within the ForeFire DEVS fire spread simulator and to obtain acceptable results in less than a minute for a large...

Haines Index (HI) was developed by USDA Forest Service to measure the atmosphere's contribution to the growth potential of a wildfire. The Haines Index combines two atmospheric factors that are known to have an effect on wildfires: Stability and Dryness. As operational tools, HI proved its ability to predict plume dominated high intensity wildfires...

Drifting seaweeds plays a major role in areas where they are present. We describe a computer model, JeoSim that clarifies the roles of those seaweeds in relation to their transport using particle-tracking algorithm. The Euler rule with trapezoidal approximation, used to calculate drifting paths, is implemented in JeoSim in discrete events fashion i...

This work presents an enhanced version of a simple model of surface fire spread, already reported in [J.H. Balbi, J.L. Rossi, T. Marcelli, P.A. Santoni, Combust. Sci. Technol. 178 (2007) 2511–2537]. The simplicity of the original model was preserved and the “faster than real time” simulation speed was retained. The empirical relations were replaced...

In this study we attempt to couple the MesoNH atmospheric model in its large eddy simulation configuration with a fire contour model, ForeFire. Coupling is performed at each atmospheric time step, with the fire propagation model inputting the wind fields and outputting heat and vapour fluxes to the atmospheric model. ForeFire model is a Lagrangian...

Simulating the interaction between fire and atmosphere is critical to the estimation of the rate of spread of the fire. Wildfire’s convection (i.e., entire plume) can modify the local meteorology throughout the atmospheric boundary layer and consequently affect the fire propagation speed and behaviour. In this study, we use for the first time the M...

Poster presented in the EGU General Assembly 2009, Vienna, Austria, 19-24 april 2009

Dépot APP: IDDN.FR.001.120002.000.S.P.2009.000.20.700