In the traditional Drossel-Schwabl forest fire model (DS model), the frequency distributions of fire size and fire interval follow a power law and an exponential law, respectively. However, it is found that the frequency-interval distribution of actual forest fires is not exponential, but a power law with periodical fluctuations which may be caused by the daily cycle of weather parameters. Therefore, a weather driven forest fire model (WD model) is built considering actual hourly weather records, with which the fire igniting probability is calculated. The simulation results indicate that the frequency-interval distribution of the WD model agrees with that of actual forest fire data and, at the same time, the frequency-size distributions of the WD and the DS models are in accordance with each other. In the further analysis of the temporal property of weather data, it is found that the change of weather data also exhibits a power-law relation with periodic fluctuations, implying that the external driving from weather parameters is the essential reason for the power-law distribution of fire intervals. The results suggest that natural systems may be coupled with each other and that the decoupling of systems is important to identifying system characteristics.

• Received 15 September 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.75.016109