PROPAGATOR, a Cellular Automata Model for Fast Wildfire Simulations: Latest Improvements and Future Perspectives ^†

The development of exhaustive wildfire management strategies is a priority, especially in Mediterranean countries where fire-prone conditions are widespread. The lack of prevention and preparedness capacities and the difficulties in rapidly sharing useful information to cope with the direct impacts on exposed people among first responders and Civil Protection Authorities (CPAs) are important issues. Extreme weather conditions characterize the main wildfire emergencies in southern EU countries [1], where the fire propagation is rapid and the authorities struggle to cope with wildfire events.

For these reasons, the use of fast operational tools in emergency response, based on reliable wildfire spread maps and efficient risk maps, is an urgent requirement for first responders and CPAs. Wildfire models can be useful in predicting the wildfire spread and helping the identification of the best firefighting strategies to be applied.

PROPAGATOR [2] is a cellular automata model which simulates wildfire spread through empirical laws that guarantee probabilistic outputs. The model requires as inputs the wind speed and direction, fine fuel moisture content, the digital elevation model and the vegetation cover of the area. The underlying grid is made up of 20 meters-square cells.

The model has been an object of continuous improvement, now being able to simulate a selection of firefighting activities and the fire spotting phenomenon. A new module allows us to compute and store the fireline intensity of the simulated front. This improvement would allow the user to quantify the severity of the fire evolution, for fast impact assessments. In order to improve the reliability of both wildfire propagation and fireline intensity estimation, satellite imagery should be adopted to refine available mapping in an on-demand fashion, rendering PROPAGATOR able to perform the quick and reliable simulation of fire spread scenarios at the European scale.