Estimation of Smoke Plume Height from Early Burning via Simulation

2014 ◽  
Vol 931-932 ◽  
pp. 1154-1162
Author(s):  
Panuphan Limthavorn ◽  
Watcharapong Tachajapong

At present, the forest fires cause smoke and pollution problem in Chiang Mai that affects human, animal, and ecosystems. Over the past few years, air pollution from forest fire has increased. The resident in northern of Thailand faces problems with air pollution and deforestation. Protecting the forest fires and environmental is the one of top priority in solving this problem in northern of Thailand. Therefore, early burning is one of the solution that has been chosen to used in Chiang Mai forest fire prevention strategies.

2021 ◽  
pp. 101053952110317
Author(s):  
Bin Jalaludin ◽  
Frances L. Garden ◽  
Agata Chrzanowska ◽  
Budi Haryanto ◽  
Christine T. Cowie ◽  
...  

Smoke from forest fires can reach hazardous levels for extended periods of time. We aimed to determine if there is an association between particulate matter ≤2.5 µm in aerodynamic diameter (PM2.5) and living in a forest fire–prone province and cognitive function. We used data from the Indonesian Family and Life Survey. Cognitive function was assessed by the Ravens Colored Progressive Matrices (RCPM). We used regression models to estimate associations between PM2.5 and living in a forest fire–prone province and cognitive function. In multivariable models, we found very small positive relationships between PM2.5 levels and RCPM scores (PM2.5 level at year of survey: β = 0.1%; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.01% to 0.19%). There were no differences in RCPM scores for children living in forest fire–prone provinces compared with children living in non-forest fire–prone provinces (mean difference = −1.16%, 95% CI = −2.53% to 0.21%). RCPM scores were lower for children who had lived in a forest fire–prone province all their lives compared with children who lived in a non-forest fire–prone province all their life (β = −1.50%; 95% CI = −2.94% to −0.07%). Living in a forest fire–prone province for a prolonged period of time negatively affected cognitive scores after adjusting for individual factors.


2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-23
Author(s):  
Josiah Marquis ◽  
Meriem Benlamri ◽  
Elizabeth Dent ◽  
Tharmitha Suyeshkumar

Almost half of the Canadian landscape is made up of forests, but the amount of forest surface area burned every year has been growing steadily since 1960.1 This can be problematic due to the effects that forest fires have not only on the local environment but also on the globe as a whole. A forest fire or vegetation fire is defined as any open fire of vegetation such as savannah, forest, agriculture, or peat that is initiated by humans or nature.2 Vegetation fires contribute heavily to air pollution and climate change and are in turn exacerbated by them as well. Air pollution increases due to emissions from these fires, which contain 90-95% carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide as well as methane and other volatile compounds.2 Emissions from forest fires also contribute to global greenhouse gases and aerosol particles (biomass burning organic aerosols),2 leading to indirect and direct consequences to human health. In contrast to biomass burning for household heating and cooking, catastrophic events of forest fires and sweeping grassland fires result in unique exposures and health consequences. In this case report, the relationship between environmental hazardous air pollutants and the potential physiological and psychological health effects associated with the forest fire that affected Fort McMurray, AB in May 2016 are considered.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Fang ◽  
Zeyu Qiao ◽  
Jian Yang

<p>Forest fire is a natural disaster threatening global human well-beings as well as a crucial disturbance agent driving forest landscape changes. The remotely sensed burned area (BA) products can provide spatially and temporally continuous monitoring of global fires, but the accuracies remain to be improved. We firstly developed a hybrid burned area mapping approach, which integrated the advantages of a 250 m global BA product (CCI_Fire) and a 30 m global forest change (GFC) product, to generate an improved 250 m BA product (so-called CCI_GFC product). Based on 248 fire patches derived from Landsat imagery, the results showed that the CCI_GFC product improved the CCI_Fire product substantially, which are significantly better than MCD64A1 product. According to the CCI_GFC, we found the total BA in the past 17 years was about 12.1 million ha in China, which approximately covered 6.1% of the total forested areas with a significantly decreased trend through Mann-Kendall test (Tau= -0.47, P<0.05) . We conducted a grid analysis (0.05°×0.05°) to determine the hot spots of forest fire from 2001 to 2017. We also quantified fire characteristics on frequency, spatial distribution, and seasonality in terms of Burned Forest Rate (BFR), hot spot areas, and fire seasons, respectively. We found that low frequency burns with a 0<BFR≤20% in 17 years covered 64% of total grids; the medium-low frequency burns (20%<BFR≤40%), the medium frequency burns (40%<BFR≤60%), the medium-high frequency burns (60%< BFR≤80%) accounted for 15%, 7%, 4% respectively; the high frequency burns (80%<BFR≤100%) and extremely high burns (100%<BFR≤120%) together occupy 10% of total grids which mainly distributed in Xiao Hinggan mountains, south China, and southwest China. The seasonality of forest fires differed substantially among eco-regions. The fire seasons of two temperate forest eco-regions are spring and autumn. The two peak fire months are May and October, in which about 22% and 37% of the total burned area were founded respectively. As a comparison, fire seasons in tropical and subtropical eco-regions are spring and winter (i.e., November to March of the next year), which accounted 88% of the total burned area. Our study clearly illustrated the characteristics of forest fire patterns in the past 17 years, which highlighted the remarkable achievements due to a nationwide implementation of fire prevention policy. At the same time, we emphasized that it is critically important to regard the long-term forest fire dynamics to design scientific and reasonable strategies or methods for fire management and controlling, which will be of sound significance to optimize the allocation of financial resources on fire management, and to achieve sustainable management of forests.</p>


2004 ◽  
Vol 155 (10) ◽  
pp. 437-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Urs Gimmi ◽  
Matthias Bürgi ◽  
Thomas Wohlgemuth

In August 2003, a disastrous fire destroyed some 300 ha of forest near Leuk in the Swiss Canton of Valais. This extreme event heightened, for a time at least, public awareness of forest fires and triggered various research activities. Forest fires play an important part in the forest dynamics of the Valais. In this article we present a historical database, which contains data on outbreaks of fire over the past 100 years. The temporal variability of forest fires is analysed and possible relations to climate change and changes in forest use discussed. Three of the largest fires are presented as case studies (Ochsenboden in July 1921, Aletschwald/Riederhorn in May 1944 and Pfynwald in July 1962). Although wide areas of forest have been burnt in past fires, no outbreak in the last 100 years reached the extent of the forest fire of Leuk in 2003.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
yudong Li ◽  
Zhongke Feng ◽  
Ziyu Zhao ◽  
Wenyuan Ma ◽  
Shilin Chen ◽  
...  

Abstract Forest fires can cause serious harm. Scientifically predicting forest fires is an important basis for preventing them. Currently, there is little research on the prediction of long time-series forest fires in China. Choosing a suitable forest fire prediction model and predicting the probability of Chinese forest fire occurrence are of great importance to China’s forest fire prevention and control work. Based on fire hotspot, meteorological, terrain, vegetation, infrastructure, and socioeconomic data collected from 2003 to 2016, we used a random forest model as a feature-selection method to identify 13 major drivers of forest fires in China. The forest fire prediction models developed in this study are based on four machine-learning algorithms: an artificial neural network, a radial basis function network, a support-vector machine, and a random forest. The models were evaluated using the five performance indicators of accuracy, precision, recall, f1 value, and area under the curve. We used the optimal model to obtain the probability of forest fire occurrence in various provinces in China and created a spatial distribution map of the areas with high incidences of forest fires. The results showed that the prediction accuracy of the four forest fire prediction models was between 75.8% and 89.2%, and the area under the curve value was between 0.840 and 0.960. The random forest model had the highest accuracy (89.2%) and area under the curve value (0.96); thus, it was used as the optimal model to predict the probability of forest fire occurrence in China. The prediction results indicate that the areas with high incidences of forest fires are mainly concentrated in north-eastern China (Heilongjiang Province and northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region) and south-eastern China (including Fujian Province and Jiangxi Province). In areas at high risk of forest fire, management departments can improve forest fire prevention and control by establishing watch towers and using other monitoring equipment. This study helps in understanding the main drivers of forest fires in China, provides a reference for the selection of high-precision forest fire prediction models, and provides a scientific basis for China’s forest fire prevention and control work.


Author(s):  
Gopalakrishnan G ◽  
Arul Mozhi Varman S ◽  
Dinessh T C ◽  
Divayarupa S ◽  
Benazir Begam R

Over the past years, a radical change in Earth’s temperature has been recorded. It has caused global warming and severe changes in climatic conditions. Naturally, this has resulted in many natural disasters. Forest fire is one such calamity that harms the environment to a great extent. The traditional methods of controlling and suppressing the fires are ineffective as the fires spread too rapidly if it is not contained at the initial stage. Hence this paper proposes a system that aims to automatically detect forest fires and suppress them. This system will suppress and contain the forest fires long enough for the firefighters to arrive.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-133
Author(s):  
Muhammad Ichsan Kabullah ◽  
Hendri Koeswara ◽  
Didi Rahmadi

This article departs from the weak commitment of the Riau Province Government in handling forest fires. Law Number 23 in 2014 stated that the forestry affairs has transferred from regencies/cities to provinces. In that sense, the Riau Province Government should be followed by budget support for fire forest prevention programs. In fact, the budget policies of the Riau Province Government have not shown maximum results for forest fire prevention programs. The research method used a qualitative with case study approach. We used several data collection techniques such as in-depth interviews, observation, documentation and focus group discussions. The findings show that policymakers are alienated from their obligation to prioritize forest fire issues in budgeting. Powerlessness and meaninglessness clearly injure the trust of the public, which often feels suffering when forest fires occur. In the future, it is necessary to make various strategies, including environmental-based budget planning and increasing public participation in monitoring budget planning.


Complexity ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josué Toledo-Castro ◽  
Pino Caballero-Gil ◽  
Nayra Rodríguez-Pérez ◽  
Iván Santos-González ◽  
Candelaria Hernández-Goya ◽  
...  

Huge losses and serious threats to ecosystems are common consequences of forest fires. This work describes a forest fire controller based on fuzzy logic and decision-making methods aiming at enhancing forest fire prevention, detection, and fighting systems. In the proposal, the environmental monitoring of several dynamic risk factors is performed with wireless sensor networks and analysed with the proposed fuzzy-based controller. With respect to this, meteorological variables, polluting gases and the oxygen level are measured in real time to estimate the existence of forest fire risks in the short-term and to detect the recent occurrence of fire outbreaks over different forest areas. Besides, the Analytic Hierarchy Process method is used to determine the level of fire spread, and, when necessary, environmental alerts are sent by a Web service and received by a mobile application. For this purpose, integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity of environmental information and alerts are protected with implementations of Lamport’s authentication scheme, Diffie-Lamport signature, and AES-CBC block cipher.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Raffles Brotestes Panjaitan ◽  
Sumartono Sumartono ◽  
Sarwono Sarwono ◽  
Choirul Saleh

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate forest fires and their relationship to prevention and mitigation strategies based on the empirical problems raised by this study. Public policy implementation (in this case, the policy of forest fire management) is influenced by the role played by government and by the participation of the public and stakeholders (in this case, companies), as well as the effects of good governance. Thus, from the empirical problems associated with theoretical problems and normative problems, this study raises the influence of the role of central and local government on the implementation of forest fire prevention policy in Indonesia, which is moderated by the good governance variable. Design/methodology/approach This study used a quantitative approach by adopting survey methodology. The study has aimed to assess both large and small population groups, by selecting and reviewing carefully chosen samples of the population to find the incidence, distribution and relative interrelation of the variables considered (Kerlinger and Lee, 2000). The survey was undertaken in areas of Indonesia that have a high level of vulnerability to forest fires. There are currently six provinces – Riau, Jambi, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, East Kalimantan and South Kalimantan – that have the highest intensity of forest fires. The study population was taken from 105 villages in those six major provinces experiencing forest fires. Sample size precision was determined by using Slovin’s formula with a precision of 10 percent and, thus, a sample size of 52 was obtained. Findings The central government’s activities have no significant effect on regional forest fire prevention. However, the results found that there is a significant effect caused by the interaction between the central and local governments and their governance of forest fire prevention. Even though the direct effect is not significant, the interaction effect significantly influences the forest fire prevention governance variable, which is a pure moderator. This study found that the role of central government has no effect on forest fire prevention. If the role of the central government is high, it will not impact the effectiveness of forest fire prevention, which is reflected in the aspects of prevention and early warning, reward and punishment, the improvement and management of ecosystems by reviewing courts, law enforcement and national and regional synergy. Originality/value This is one of the few public administration science studies to have investigated the relationship between good governance and forest fire policy in Indonesia, particularly the combined roles played by central and local governments.


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