The mscfirespreadmodel from ushham

mscfirespreadmodel's Introduction

This project was undertaken as part of the disertation in part fulfilment of the MSc in Mathematical Modelling, taught at UCL (University College London).

The project models forest fire spread using Cellular Automata, taking into account: Wind, Topography, Firebreaks and Firebrands.

The code requires a number of data sources, and the locations of the data sourses need to be linked at Control -> Parameters. These sourses can be found at the following locations:

Weather Data: Climate Data Store

Surface Water Data: European Commision Data Store

Road Data: Open Street Map, downloaded via Geofabrik

Elevation Data: GMTED2010 Database

Historic Fire Data: NASA Earth Data

The folders contain the following key scripts:

Folder	Key Scripts	Purpose
Control	Parameters	Definition of file locations, coordinates of fire, resolution of raster files to be produced.
Barriers	RoadData	Extracting road data from OpenStreetMap and creating raster file at defined resolution.
CA Spreading	CA_Definition & CA_Run	The parameters which control the spreading behaviour of the CA, and the script which runs the data extraction and running of the CA.
Elevations	ElevationData	Extraction and interpolation of elevation data, which outputs raster file.
Fire_Locations	FireData	Extract locations of fire observations from satellite data.
FireSpotting	CombinedModel	The three sub models described in the report are combined to produce a sample of locations where firebrands are expected to ignite fuel.
Surface_Water	WaterData	Extraction of surface water data, given the number of months per year water is identified to be at that location (default is 12 months).
Weather	Grib_Ext & Wind_Slope	Extraction of wind data from GRIB files at the specified time periods. This wind data is then modified using the topography as described in the report.
Mapping_Tools	-	Miscellaneous functions used to undertake calculations for mapping, or conversion of one data type to another