Modeling of wind flow and its impact on forest fire spread: Cellular automata approach

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a model of wind flow and its impact on the forest fire spread by using Cellular Automata (CA) approach. The wind model determines the wind flow and speed according to the topography of the studied area and climate data. While in a previous work we took into consideration only uniform wind direction and speed, in this one we have improved the forest fire model which takes into account both the physical attributes (Topography, land use, nature and density of vegetation) and the climatic parameters (humidity, wind) by considering wind flow. As an application we consider a region in the North of Morocco.