The Missing Wind in Wildfire Science

As I step into my new role as Associate Editor of the International Journal of Wildland Fire, I find myself looking back at the different wildfire-modelling problems I have engaged with over the years. Alongside the development of a fully-physical wildfire behaviour-prediction model, much of my work has focused on the physics of fire behaviour, including the interaction between wind and the fire front, wildfire spread regimes, slope effect and slope–wind coupling, junction fires, and scaling approaches in wildfire science. Across these topics, one mechanism consistently emerges yet remains only partially understood and poorly represented in predictive models: the wind generated by the fire itself. Fire-induced wind is often treated as a secondary outcome, despite its direct influence on plume dynamics and fire behaviour. This editorial is an attempt to step back from individual case studies and examine why this phenomenon is still not fully characterized, why it deserves more focused attention, and what experimental and numerical challenges are holding it back.