Chaotic Attractors in Wildland Fire Behavior

There is a growing body of information on the blow-up nature of wildland fires. These blow-up events refer to abrupt and unexpected changes in local flow within a fire. Recent advances in coupled fire-atmosphere modeling of these events have demonstrated the need for further theory to account for uncaptured changes in the fire-atmosphere system. Blow-up events, similar to the atmosphere, show characteristic deviations in predicted behavior, indicative of a chaotic system. Given that the clustering of vegetation and the atmosphere itself are chaotic systems, it is reasonable to posit that fire, which is driven by these systems, would display similar characteristics. We present work to identify the presence of chaotic attractors using FIRETEC, an atmosphere model coupled with a physics-based fire behavior model. A two-pronged approach is used to tease apart the influences of vegetation distribution(clustering) and atmospheric perturbations on phase-space transitions. We discuss the implications of identifying phase-space characteristics and chaotic attractors in wildland fire systems as it pertains to future modeling approaches.