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Atmospheric turbulence

Formally Refereed

Abstract

It has long been established that the behavior of wildland fires and the dispersion of smoke during wildland fire events are influenced by ambient and fire-induced winds (Crosby 1949; Byram and Nelson 1951; Byram 1954; Gifford 1957; Rothermel 1972; Raupach 1990; Beer 1991). Fundamentally, ambient and fire-induced winds affect the horizontal and vertical convective flux of heat in the fire environment and the ability of spreading fires to transfer heat convectively to potential fuels (Rothermel 1972). The transport of firebrands away from active burning locations and the opportunity for spotting ignitions are also governed by the ambient and fire-induced wind fields within and near the fire environment (Koo et al. 2010). Finally, ambient and fire-induced circulations in the lower atmospheric boundary layer (ABL), the lowest layer of the atmosphere, act to disperse emissions away from fires, which often results in the subsequent long-range transport of smoke plumes by winds in the ABL and above to locations far downwind of the burning location (Liu et al. 2009; Heilman et al. 2014).

Citation

Heilman Warren E.; Clements Craig B.; Zhong, Shiyuan; Clark, Kenneth L.; Bian, Xindi. 2019. Atmospheric turbulence. In: Manzello, S.L., ed. Encyclopedia of wildfires and wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires. Cham, Switzerland: Springer: 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51727-8_137-1
Citations
https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/57329