Introduction

Cell2Fire is a new cell-based forest fire growth model predictor. It is open-source, and exploits parallelism to support the modeling of fire growth across large spatial and temporal scales. The fire environment is characterized by partitioning the landscape into a large number of homogeneous cells and specifying the fuel, weather, fuel moisture and, topography attributes of each cell. As per Canadian Forest Fire Behavior Prediction (FBP) system the rate of spread and the symmetry of fire within each cell is assumed to be elliptical. The Cell2Fire simulator includes powerful statistical and graphical output along with spatial analysis features. This helps to predict the growth of real and realistic hypothetical fires and comparing our fire growth predictions with the ones produced by the Prometheus Fire Growth Simulator.

This is an on-going project and is expected to grow over time. The original draft of the academic paper is available on arXiv and an updated version is currently under review.