Input Data Preparation for Fire Behavior Fuel Modeling of Bulgarian Test Cases

Since the year 2000 Bulgaria is facing progressive increase of wildland fire occurrence. That is caused mainly because of human mistakes in having fire camps or agricultural land processing after crop harvesting. At the moment Bulgaria has no working mechanism to spot such fires before they become a threat, however the team from Bulgarian Academy of Sciences is working on fire behaviour modelling issues since 2007 and in this work the first attempts for Bulgarian forestry data classification will be presented according to the existing 53 Fire Behavior Fuel Models (FBFMs), and estimations where custom fuels has to be prepared for better representation of the potential fire spread. Calibrations with FARSITE (Fire Area Simulator) runs have been performed for the area of Zlatograd Forestry Department (Bulgaria) and the results are compared with Harmanli (Bulgaria) WRF-Fire/S-Fire simulations. The differences in the fire behaviour fuel models estimations reflect in the final simulated burned area which is presented in the conclusions. Fire behaviour fuel modeling based on both simulation approaches in Zlatograd and Harmanli areas gives future application of the presented work for Bulgarian test cases.