Goal: Apply Knowledge Globally QUIC-Fire: A fast, 3D simulation tool for prescribed fire planning

Coupled fire-atmospheric modeling tools are increasingly used to understand the complex and dynamic behavior of wildland fires. But many of these tools require high-performance computing resources.

QUIC-Fire is a new fire modeling tool designed to rapidly solve complex fire behavior problems. Unlike other modeling tools, QUIC-Fire can run on a basic laptop. QUIC-Fire can also represent fire atmospheric feedbacks, including those that govern prescribed fire behavior, at relevant scales.

QUIC-Fire was developed so that a broader set of users could explore fire prescriptions and how these prescriptions link to achieving a fire’s objectives.

QUIC-Fire simulates how fuel structure influences local winds and fire behavior in a similar manner as the state of the art computational fluid dynamics wildfire model, FIRETEC, developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. QUIC-Fire uses 3D fuels inputs similar to this model.

Results comparing fire behavior metrics between QUIC-Fire and FIRETEC show strong agreement.

QUIC-Fire’s ability to simulate the response to both ignition patterns and a temporally and spatially variable fire environment without the computational expense of fluid dynamics solutions was a critical design feature.