Quickstart

Important

It is imperative that a working WRF-SFIRE installation is available. Please first follow the installation instructions Installation.

First fire forecast

The simplest way to start is to invoke the standalone script

./simple_forecast.sh

The script will ask you a series of questions with sensible defaults and at the end will create a JSON configuration file and finish with instructions on how to run the simulation.

Example fire forecast

To perform a fire forecast, the script forecast.sh has to be executed with a JSON configuration file as an argument, for example:

./forecast.sh <json-configuration-file>

An example configuration script is examples/simple_fire.json, also listed here for convenience. The script has most of the values filled out but there are some placeholders.

Please set the following values:

• geogrid_path should point to the directory with your WPS-GEOG data
• num_nodes are the number of nodes to use for the parallel job
• ppn the number of processors per node to use
• wall_time_hrs number of hours of wall time to reserve for the job
• qsys the queueing subsystem id which point into etc/clusters.json

{
  "grid_code": "test",
  "grib_source": "NAM",
  "wps_namelist_path": "etc/nlists/default.wps",
  "wrf_namelist_path": "etc/nlists/default.input",
  "fire_namelist_path": "etc/nlists/default.fire",
  "emissions_namelist_path": "etc/nlists/default.fire_emissions",
  "geogrid_path": "/path/to/your/WPS-GEOG",
  "num_nodes": 10,
  "ppn": 12,
  "wall_time_hrs": 3,
  "qsys": "sge",
  "start_utc": "T-30",
  "end_utc": "T+300",
  "domains" : {
    "1" : {
      "cell_size" : [1000, 1000],
      "domain_size" : [91, 91],
      "center_latlon" : [39.1, -105.9],
      "truelats" : [38.5, 39.6],
      "stand_lon" : -105.9,
      "time_step" : 5,
      "history_interval" : 15,
      "geog_res" : "0.3s",
      "subgrid_ratio" : [50, 50]
    }
  },
  "ignitions" : {
     "1" : [ {
      "start_delay_s" : 600,
      "duration_s" : 240,
      "lat" : 39.894264,
      "long" : -103.903222
     } ]
  },
 "postproc" : {
    "1" : [ "T2", "PSFC", "WINDSPD", "WINDVEC", "FIRE_AREA", "FGRNHFX", "FLINEINT", "SMOKE_INT" ]
  }
}

This example configuration runs a fire simulation with the following settings:

• a single domain configuration with a domain placed approximately around an ignition point
• use NAM as the source for initial and boundary conditions
• start at time now minus 30 mins and run a 5 hour simulation
• use 10 nodes, 12 CPU cores per node, allow a wall time of 3 hrs, the queue manager is SGE (Sun Grid Engine)
• use the default WPS/WRF/fire/emissions namelists as base
• ignite the fire 600s after the start of the simulation and deactivate the ignition after 4 minutes.
• generate surface temperature maps, wind information and fire fields for domain 1, the where the fire is burning

Tip

To learn how to configure jobs in more detail, refer to Forecasting.