On wind and fire: Revisiting the classics

The interaction between wind and fire has been addressed by several authors in classical fire literature, from George Byram (1959) and Richard Rothermel (1972) in the U.S. Forest Services to Tom Beer (1991) in CSIRO Australia. In this paper, we revisit the early approaches taken by these pioneers and propose a new conceptual model based on their findings. In this new conceptual model, the effect of wind on fire spread is reduced by the indrafts created by fire intensity and the resulting convection. The model is successfully applied to data on experimental fires compiled by Catchpole et al. (1998).