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Capturing Plume Rise and Dispersion with a Coupled Large-Eddy Simulation: Case Study of a Prescribed Burn Moisseeva, Nadya; Stull, Roland B., 1950-

Abstract

Current understanding of the buoyant rise and subsequent dispersion of smoke due to wildfires has been limited by the complexity of interactions between fire behavior and atmospheric conditions, as well as the uncertainty in model evaluation data. To assess the feasibility of using numerical models to address this knowledge gap, we designed a large-eddy simulation of a real-life prescribed burn using a coupled semi-emperical fire–atmosphere model. We used observational data to evaluate the simulated smoke plume, as well as to identify sources of model biases. The results suggest that the rise and dispersion of fire emissions are reasonably captured by the model, subject to accurate surface thermal forcing and relatively steady atmospheric conditions. Overall, encouraging model performance and the high level of detail offered by simulated data may help inform future smoke plume modeling work, plume-rise parameterizations and field experiment designs.

Item Metadata

Title
Capturing Plume Rise and Dispersion with a Coupled Large-Eddy Simulation: Case Study of a Prescribed Burn
Creator
Moisseeva, Nadya; Stull, Roland B., 1950-
Publisher
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Date Issued
2019-09-25
Description
Current understanding of the buoyant rise and subsequent dispersion of smoke due to wildfires has been limited by the complexity of interactions between fire behavior and atmospheric conditions, as well as the uncertainty in model evaluation data. To assess the feasibility of using numerical models to address this knowledge gap, we designed a large-eddy simulation of a real-life prescribed burn using a coupled semi-emperical fire–atmosphere model. We used observational data to evaluate the simulated smoke plume, as well as to identify sources of model biases. The results suggest that the rise and dispersion of fire emissions are reasonably captured by the model, subject to accurate surface thermal forcing and relatively steady atmospheric conditions. Overall, encouraging model performance and the high level of detail offered by simulated data may help inform future smoke plume modeling work, plume-rise parameterizations and field experiment designs.
Subject
wildfire plume rise; smoke modeling; large eddy simulation; emissions dispersion; WRF-SFIRE; RxCADRE
Genre
Article
Type
Text
Language
eng
Date Available
2019-10-25
Provider
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights
CC BY 4.0
DOI
10.14288/1.0384633
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/2429/72058
Affiliation
Science, Faculty of; Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Department of
Citation
Atmosphere 10 (10): 579 (2019)
Publisher DOI
10.3390/atmos10100579
Peer Review Status
Reviewed
Scholarly Level
Faculty
Rights URI
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Aggregated Source Repository
DSpace

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CC BY 4.0