P3       Data assimilation cycling in a coupled fire-atmosphere model.

Haley, James, Angel Farguell, Jan Mandel, and Lauren Hern, University of Colorado Denver, and Adam Kochanski, University of Utah

Wildfires are a complicated phenomena. The WRF-SFIRE model couples couples an atmospheric model with a wildfire spread model in order to most accurately forecast wildfire behavior. As additional information about an active fire, in the form of satellite observations, becomes available, it is advantageous to steer the model through data assimilation techniques. Data assimilation can change the state of the model to more closely resemble the  observed state of the wildfire but can result in a situation where the state of the modeled wildfire is not in agreement with the state of the modeled atmosphere. In this presentation we detail a method called cycling  for creating an artificial fire history which is then used to bring the state of the modeled atmosphere into agreement with the modeled fire state.