A study on fractal simulation of forest fire spread

Combustible materials, such as their surface area, have not featured scale, yet the process of forest fire spread contains the self-replicating feature, which both contribute to the self-similarity of fire spread. Consequently, fire behaviors can be described by fractal geometry. In this research, we select Wuchagou forest in Daxinanlin Mountain as the experimental site where a forest fire took place several years ago. The forest fire was detected on low-resolution NOAA-AVHRR images, and fire spread was simulated on high-resolution TM images as another attempt at the mergence of information. Based on remote sensing and GIS, we adopted the method of limited spreading lumping (DLA), which describes growing phenomenon to simulate the dynamic process of fire spread, adjusting the shape of the result of fire simulation by the scale rule. As a result, the simulated fire and the actual fire manifest the self-similarity in their spreading shapes as well as the quantitative similarity in their areas.