WEDNESDAY, September 4, 2002
Time: 1:30 - 3:00 PM
Constant Hall Room 1043

Title: Level Set Methods in Wildland Firespread Modeling

Vivien Mallet
Ecole Centrale de Lyon & Old Dominion University

Level set methods and their close cousins, fast marching methods, are versatile and extensible techniques for general front tracking problems, including the critical problem of predicting wildland firespread. Given a speed function, empirical or otherwise, to specify the advance of the firefront in its normal direction, these techniques harness the well developed computational machinery of hyperbolic conservation laws to evolve the front with minimal anxiety over topological features, such as islands, mergers, firebreaks, etc. Nevertheless, realistic firefront models require some generalizations of basic level set theory.

This talk summarizes key results from the scientific literatures of level sets and firespread, demonstrates the applicability of level set methods to wildland fire modeling through numerical experiments, presents current limitations, and proposes future directions in the simulation and control of wildland fires.