Simulation and visualization of forest fire growth in an integrated 3D virtual geographical environment - a preliminary study

It is important to understand how wildland fire is spreading in a given forest landscape as this information is critical to many applications such as emergency response and decision support for fire suppression, prescribed burning, fire prevention education and fighting training. We review the progress in fire spread simulation and virtual forest modeling, and present a 3D forest fire spread simulation and visualization system. Methods and techniques for modeling and visualization of terrain, trees and vegetations and fires are discussed and incorporated with fire spread simulation and visualization system. An integrated environment was built based on OntoPlant, a suite of virtual plant software developed in house, FARSITE fire simulator developed by the USDA as fire spread engine and Open Scene Graph (OSG). The system can display a realistic 3D wildfire scenario taking into consideration the factors such as terrain, vegetation type and weather conditions. Fire is rendered by using particle system, while the level of detail and curve morphing technique are used to animate the flame and smoke under various slope and wind conditions. During the fire propagation, the appearances of burned plants are updated automatically. The fire spreading is visualized according to the calculations derived from the fire simulation engine. Greater insight can be gained as users realistically and intuitively view the fire progress in our 3D virtual forest environment.