Fire Propagation Visualization in Real Time

SIGFRIDO WAIDELICH; LANERI KARINA; DENHAM, MÓNICA

Journal of Computer Science & Technology

Iberoamerican Science & Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC) Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI)

Lugar: La Plata; Año: 2018 vol. 18 p. 239 - 247

Our motivation comes from the need of a tailoredcomputational tool for simulation and prediction offorest fire propagation, to be used by firefighters inPatagonia, Argentina. Based on previous works onGraphic Processing Units (GPU) for fitting and sim-ulating fires in our region, we developed a visualiza-tion interface for real time computing, simulation andprediction of fire propagation. We have the possibil-ity of changing the ensemble of raster maps layers tochange the region in which fire will propagate. Thevisualization platform runs on GPUs and the user canrotate and zoom the landscape to select the optimalview of fire propagation. Opacity of different layerscan be regulated by the user, allowing to see fire prop-agation at the same time that underlying vegetation,wind direction and intensity. The ignition point canalso be selected by the user, and firebreaks can beplotted while simulation is going on. After the perfor-mance of a high number of stochastic simulations inparallel in GPUs, the application shows a map of thefinal fire surface colored according to the probabilitythat a given cell burns. In this way the user can visu-ally identify the most critical direction for fire prop-agation, a useful information to stop fire optimizingresources, which is specially important when they arescarce like is the case of our Patagonia region.