Predictively capturing wildfire behavior has been researched for hundreds of years, but here at Los Alamos weâve applied our supercomputing resources to capture fire behavior using our developed HIGRAD/FIRETEC coupled software. HIGRAD is a CFD model which resolves atmospheric turbulent flow on a landscape-scale LES scheme. FIRETEC is a fire model which captures fuel consumption and fire spread. This coupled software was developed at Los Alamos 25+ years ago with a focus on fire spread, but as weâve continually succeeded at predicating fire spread rates and extent, attention has been turned to other aspects of fire behavior. In addition, using lessons learned from the development of FIRETEC, Los Alamos researchers have been developing a new, computationally inexpensive, fire behavior model, QUIC-Fire. QUIC-Fire is designed to capture general fire behavior but rather than requiring supercomputing resources and a lot of time, QUIC-Fire can be ran on a simple laptop in real-time.
