On the time to first spotting in wildland fires

Abstract

Protecting human life and property from wildfires is a primary concern to wildland fire management agencies. Under certain environmental conditions and wildfire situations, burning embers can be lofted across a natural or man-made barrier devoid of fuel, such as a river or road, resulting in new ignitions downwind of the main advancing fire front. This phenomenon, referred to as a “spot fire” or “spotting,” can put a considerable strain on firefighting operations and pose a grave risk to wildland-urban interface communities. In this article, we formulate the process of spot fire development, and derive the distribution of the time to the first spot fire occurring beyond a barrier to fire spread. A simulator is developed in the framework of generating burning embers from an active wildfire that may result in a spot fire. With the generated data, we demonstrate how to estimate the rate of developing spot fires and identify significant covariates based on data in two practical formats.

Keywords:

• Current status
• Firebrand
• Poisson process
• Right censoring
• Simulation
• Wildfire modeling

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous referees for their insightful comments and suggestions.