Modeling wildland fire with DIRSIG

The purpose of this paper is to describe a physics based fire model in DIRSIG. The main objective is to utilize research on radiative emissions from fire to create a 3D rendering of a scene to generate a synthetic multispectral or hyperspectral image of wildfire. These synthetic images can be used to evaluate detection algorithms and sensor platforms. To produce realistic flame structures and realistic spectral emission across the visible and infrared spectrum, we first need to produce 3D time-dependent data describing the fire evolution and its interaction with the environment. Here we utilize an existing coupled atmosphere-fire model to represent the finescale dynamics of convective processes in a wildland fire. Then the grid-based output from the fire propagation model can be used in DIRSIG along with the spectral emission representative of a wildland fire to run the ray-tracing model to create the synthetic scene. The technical approach is based on a solid understanding of user requirements for format and distribution of the information provided by a high spatial resolution remote sensing system.