Wildfires Quasi-Implicit Alternative-Direction Simulations using Isogeometric Finite Element Method

Abstract

We develop a wildfire simulation model that evolves the temperature scalar field using an energy balance equation accounting for heat generation, transport, and loss. For these equations, we develop quasi-implicit time integration schemes using direction splitting of the differential operators. We use the Peaceman-Rachford and Strang splitting methods, including the Crank-Nicolson method. Based on these discretizations, we derive variational formulations and explore the Kronecker product structure of the matrices. In the wildfire model, there are some non-linear terms that we treat explicitly. We perform a detailed analysis of how treating these terms affects the stability of the time integration scheme. Namely, we show that a quasi-implicit time integration scheme achieves 10 times higher simulation accuracy. We present two wildfire simulations. The first is a simulation of the 2024 wildfire disaster in the Valparaíso region of Chile. The second one is a simulation of the 2019 wildfire disaster in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. We discuss the numerical results and compare them against satellite images and measurement records. We also present a numerical experiment for comparison with the state-of-the-art wildfire simulation model FARSITE. Our sequential code has a linear computational cost of ${\cal O}(N)$. We also present the parallel scalability of the WILDFIRE-IGA-ADS code to illustrate the possibility of running the code on a local workstation.