Abstract—Predicting the potential behavior a forest fire is an essential task in fire management which aims to minimize the negative impact of fire on property and society. Many fire spread models were developed. They are either physics-based or empirical models. These mathematical models usually use a set of non-linear equations which are mostly complex and couldn’t easily applied in developing countries like Lebanon. This paper poses a semi-empirical mathematical model referring to the experimental results used in Anderson’s model (1983) and relying on Rothermel’s model (1972). The proposed equation uses parameters of both weather and topography, where wind speed and direction, fuel moisture content and slope coefficient are introduced to obtain the expected spread rate (mile/hour).This proposed model is characterized by its simplicity and thus the possibility of implementation in Lebanon.
Index Terms—Fire spread rate, fuel moisture content, angle and slope coefficients.
Ali Karouni and Samia Bahlak are with the Lebanese University, University Institute of Technology, Saida–Lebanon (e-mail: ali.karouni@etud.univ-angers.fr, samiabahlak@hotmail.com).
Bassam Daya is with Umm Al-Qura University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Information Science Department, Makkah – KSA (e-mail: b_daya@ul.edu.lb).
Pierre Chauvet is with Laris EA, L’Unam Université, Université d’Angers, Angers – France (e-mail: pierre.chauvet@uco.fr)
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Cite: Ali Karouni, Bassam Daya, Samia Bahlak, and Pierre Chauvet, "A Simplified Mathematical Model for Fire Spread Predictions in Wildland Fires Combining between the Models of Anderson and Rothermel," International Journal of Modeling and Optimization vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 197-200, 2014.
