The use of Wildfire Analyst in the Kresna Fire 2017 (Bulgaria)

Proceedings for the 6th International Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference

April 29 – May 3, 2019, Albuquerque, New Mexico USA

Published by the International Association of Wildland Fire, Missoula, Montana, USA

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The use of Wildfire Analyst in the Kresna Fire 2017 (Bulgaria)

Nina Dobrinkova*

Institute of Information and Communication Technology – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,

Sofia, Bulgaria, [email protected]

Adrián Cardil

Tecnosylva. Parque Tecnológico de León. 24009 León, Spain, [email protected]

Peter Boyvalenkov

Institute of Mathematics and Informatics – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria,

[email protected]

Hristo Kostadinov

Institute of Mathematics and Informatics – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria,

[email protected]

Introduction to wildfire history on Bulgarian territory

Wildfire are natural hazard affecting EU countries located in southern Europe mostly. Statistics

about these fires over the past 35 years had been published in specialized reports from Joint

Research Centers (JRC), as part of the EC Directorates. The JRC Centers aim to monitor the

state of forests (http://forest.jrc.ec.europa.eu/effis/reports/annual-fire-reports/) and other natural

and material resources important to the development of the EU economy done per country. This

system collects and summarizes data on forest fires from all EU countries and provides

processed information from satellite observations and reports from the Agriculture and Forestry

Ministries of the affected areas giving the number of fires and burned areas that have occurred. It

is supposed that climate change is one of the main causes of the increasing wildfire occurrence

all over Europe. Bulgaria is included in the EFFIS monitoring system after joining the EU in

January 2007 and it clearly gives structured statistics for fire increase in many places where fire

was not that common before. Prior 2007 the Bulgarian Ministry of Agriculture, Forests

conducted its own research for the territory of Bulgaria and the increasing number of forest fires

since 1995 (www.nspbzn.mvr.bg/Sprav_informacia/Statistika/gorski.htm and

http://www.bluelink.net/bg/bulletins/ecopolis12/1_os_1.htm).

The existing statistics in Bulgaria, which are available in the official annual reports, are with

dates 1971 (see fig. 1). The information in this reporting period summarize that Bulgaria is

having increasing number of affected territories with wildland fires after the year 1990. Until

2005 the ministry was providing its reports following the number of burning fires within a

season. However after that year, the ministry started to present the burned areas for each single

fire and this official statistics is given in fig. 2.




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Figure 1. Official statistics about wildfires of the Bulgarian ministry of agriculture, forests and food

Figure 2. Burned areas in Bulgaria (in ha) for the period 2005-2015

Test case Kresna Fire (2017, Bulgaria)

The Kresna test case, which has been selected for the calibrations and experiments, occurred in

the south-west part of Bulgaria and burned from 24 to 29 August 2017. The terrain of the fire is

hilly and low-mountain, situated at elevations from about 250 m a.s.l. to 750 m a.s.l.. The fire

affected the eastern slopes of Kresna gorge above Struma River and roughly between the villages

Mechkul (to the north) and Vlahi (to the south).

The fire started in grassland-shrub zone and transferred to plantations from Pinus nigra, where it

quickly spread assisted by the dry conditions. The total affected area was about 2260 ha, of




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which 65% were forest territories. The fire burnt mostly plantations from Austrian pine (870 ha),

Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), Robinia pseudoacacia (21,1 ha) (1260 dka), natural forests

dominated by Quercus pubescens (200ha) and Quercus petraea (66 ha) and smaller patches of

other species. Pine plantations were very affected by fire with rate of mortatility higher than 80%

due to a high burn severity. On steeper slopes above Struma River the severity of burning was

lower, where some deciduous trees and single specimen of Juniperus excelsa survived. The

affected zone is mostly protected one under the NATURA 2000 areas.

The used for calibrations tool with this test case was Wildfire Analyst (WFA), which has the real

time prediction abilities as module embedded in its functionalities. WFA introduces new

simulation modes with innovative enhancements including real time processing performance,

automatic rate of spread (ROS) adjustments based on observations used to create fire behavior

databases, calculation of evacuation time zones (or ‘firesheds’), and integration of simulation

results for asset and economic impact analysis (Ramirez at all, 2011, Monedero at all 2017).

Adjustment of fire simulations in real-time by identifying adjustment points (also often

mentioned as control points) of the fire based on observations of the fire behaviour on the field,

namely the position of the fire at a certain point of time is useful functionality in WFA. With

these adjustments the simulation results tend to be more reliable during the following hours of

fire propagation. On a common basis these adjustments are estimated based on intuition and own

experience and usually require a large number of simulations and rehearsals to obtain accurate

adjustments of the fire. This frequently makes the adjustment unfeasible for operational purposes

due to the need of spending a lot of time. WFA automatically allows the adjustment of the ROS

of existing fuels and is given by the following formula:

Where the adjustment is represented by a certain value and the ROS is the rate of spread of the

fire which is influenced by several factors during its calculation such as the humidity, fuel, wind,

and slope of the terrain.

WFA has been used operationally for diverse agencies worldwide, for instance by Military

Emergency Unit and several regions in Spain, CONAF and private companies in Chile, Italy and

US wildfire services.

The initialization of WFA has been done with predefined layers in GIS format. All data was

collected from different sources that could give us idea about the fire ignition point, spread and

types of fuels, which were burning, on the field.

For a reference have been used satellite data from VIIRS. This was a way to compare the official

reports from the responsible authorities and the real fire spread captured by the satellite images.

(see fig. 3)




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Figure 3: Kresna Fire progression through VIIRS data

Figure 4: Kresna Fire Fuels




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Figure 5: Kresna fire first run with WFA with 1km buffer zone around the burned area

Data samples about fuels and first run with WFA of the Kresna fire has been presented on fig. 4

and fig. 5. The presented results are based on the very initial information, which was available,

and with the help of a forestry department of ministry of agriculture, food and forest of Bulgaria

we are refining the available datasets in order to improve our next runs.

Future work

Wildfire Analyst is a new generation tool it combines all needed parameters for a propagation

modeling of active running fire spread, however it is very fast and can use PC or supercomputer

recourses. As a future goal of the BAS team is to calibrate the whole FIRESPONSE system

which Tecnosylva Inc. is having as options for the fire modeling community.

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the Bulgarian National Science Fund project number DN 12/5 called:

Efficient Stochastic Methods and Algorithms for Large-Scale Problems and the Interreg Balkan-

Mediterranean project “Drought and fire observatory and early warning system - DISARM”.

References

Annual Fire Reports, Joint Research Center Technical Reports – Forest Fires in Europe,

Middle East and North Africa 2015, Report EUR 28148 EN, 2016:

http://forest.jrc.ec.europa.eu/effis/reports/annual-fire-reports/

Internet resources of the National Fire Safety and Civil Protection Service of Bulgaria –

www.nspbzn.mvr.bg/Sprav_informacia/Statistika/gorski.htm




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Ecopolis, bulletin 48 (2001), Forest fires reach catastrophic scales (In Bulgarian) –

http://www.bluelink.net/bg/bulletins/ecopolis12/1_os_1.htm

Ramirez, J., Monedero, S., Buckley, D., 2011. New approaches in fire simulations

analysis with Wildfire Analyst, in: The 5th International Wildland Fire Conference. Sun

City, South Africa.

Monedero, S., Ramirez, J., Molina-Terrén, D., Cardil, A., 2017. Simulating wildfires

backwards in time from the final fire perimeter in point-functional fire models.

Environmental Model. Softw. 92, 163–168.

The use of Wildfire Analyst in the Kresna Fire 2017 (Bulgaria)

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