A microscale wildfire model (QES-Fire), which dynamically couples the fire front to microscale winds, was developed utilizing a simplified physics rate of spread (ROS) model, a kinematic plume-rise model and a mass-consistent diagnostic wind solver. The model is 3-D and includes coupling between fire heat fluxes and the wind field.QES-Fire's ability to represent the strength of convection (e.g., updraft velocity and buoyancy flux) is evaluated by comparing the velocity fields from QES-Fire to the resultant velocity fields from a convective atmospheric large eddy simulation using the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF). QES-Fire has less than a 7% relative difference in the centerline vertical velocity, and less than a 10% relative difference in the integrated buoyancy flux from those calculated by WRF at a speed 8800 times faster per computational core than WRF. Additionally, the model is compared to ROS and tower data from the FireFluxII field experiment, with less than a 10% relative difference in the ROS

This seminar was part of the Missoula Fire Laboratory Weekly Seminar Series (2020-2021)