Forest Fire Burn Areas Modeled as Self-Similar Criticality

Forest fire burn areas in parts of western Canada have cumulative frequency-area distributions that are well-described by a power law or an upper-truncated power law. This power law scaling extends over as many as five orders of magnitude and is observed for different geographical regions and for different time intervals. The observed scaling exponent varies both geographically within and between provinces and temporally between annual records. The temporal variability decreases at the decadal scale, suggesting that decadal distributions may be useful for long term forecasting within a geographical region. The traditional Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) forest fire model does not produce the range of scaling exponents observed for natural fires. The model of Self-Similar Criticality (SSC), which has been used successfully to model hotspot seamount formation, replicates the cumulative frequency-area distributions observed for forest fires in western Canada.