Abstract

Every year, wildfires pose a significant problem worldwide, particularly during the summer season. Many computational models have been developed to simulate and study the effects of fire dynamics. This work proposes a coupled but simplified atmosphere-fire model to describe the phenomena in a step further than uncoupled fire spread models while avoiding the high computational cost of large coupled models. This article presents the formalization of the model and the numerical methods employed to approximate its numerical solution. Despite the simplifications and assumptions made, the model achieves competitive results in terms of capturing the fire spreading behavior and computational requirements thanks to strategies such as a two-dimensional spatial domain, turbulence modeling, topography handling by the Immersed Boundary Method, and mixed Finite Difference with Discrete Fourier Transform for the pressure solver. The proposed model and its numerical implementation are the first step towards an extended version with a three-dimensional spatial domain.