Before using a fluid dynamics physically based wildfire model to study wildfire, validation is necessary and model results need to be systematically and objectively analyzed and compared to real fires, which requires suitable data sets. Observational data from the Meteotron experiment are used to evaluate the fire-plume properties simulated by two fluid dynamics numerical wildfire models, the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) and the Clark coupled atmosphere–fire model. Comparisons based on classical plume theory between numerical model and experimental Meteotron results show that plume theory, because of its simplifying assumptions, is a fair but restricted rendition of important plume-averaged properties. The study indicates that the FDS, an explicit and computationally demanding model, produces good agreement with the Meteotron results even at a relatively coarse horizontal grid size of 4 m for the FDS, while the coupled atmosphere–fire model, a less explicit and less computationally demanding model, can produce good agreement, but that the agreement is sensitive to surface vertical-grid sizes and the method by which the energy released from the fire is put into the atmosphere.
Improvement of drag model for non-burning firebrand transport in Fire Dynamics Simulator
