Propagação de Grandes Incêndios Forestais e Dispersão de Fumo

The main objectives of LARGEFIRES project are the following: - Contribute to increase the awareness, efficiency and safety of operational agents, through a better understanding and knowledge of the physical processes associated to the fire spread and smoke dispersion in extreme wildfire events, to better mitigate and suppress them and reduce their impact on the natural and man-made environment and on human safety. - Through a better understanding of the physical processes related to the interaction between the fire and the surrounding atmosphere, that modify fire spread, causing accelerations and decelerations that render safe fire suppression virtually impossible, improve the capacity of predicting the time evolution of the head fire. - Using innovative equipment to simulate variable atmospheric stability conditions, stable, neutral and unstable, improve the knowledge of its influence on fire and smoke plume development. The modification of the convective processes induced by the vertical distribution of temperature and flow velocity and their feedback on the fire growth and smoke emission will be carefully analysed, to scale up to real conditions and contribute to clarify the possibly exaggerated role that is attributed to atmospheric stability in fire weather literature. - Using innovative concepts of fire line rotation and extension an original method to predict the evolution of the fire perimeter, as an alternative to the current approach of elliptical fire growth, will be developed to predict the temporal evolution of the fire perimeter in the course of space and time for general and arbitrary boundary conditions of topography, vegetation cover and meteorological conditions. - Improve the capacity of modelling the transport of burning particles by wind, using an original specially designed wind tunnel to determine aerodynamic and combustion properties of common firebrands, to better predict their trajectories and the location of spot fires that can have serious impact on fire safety. - Improve the understanding of smoke emission and dispersion associated to quickly accelerating and decelerating fires, based on experimental and numerical simulation and validated with observation data from field experiments and real fires. - Develop a model to simulate large fire’s smoke production and dispersion able to provide human health impacts at local and regional scales. - Produce guidelines and training material to be used in operations addressing large fires to improve fire safety and the capacity to anticipate fire spread to better plan the timing of suppression actions and to improve safety. - Produce guidelines to reduce human exposure to smoke from large fires focused on operational stakeholders and on health and environmental entities. - Develop scientific knowledge in this very demanding and challenging field of interdisciplinary science through advanced training of graduate and post-graduate students, delivering lectures and publishing scientific papers, to disseminate the results of the project.