A study of forest fire danger prediction system in Japan

All over the world, forest fires cause severe damages to valuable natural environment and loss of human lives. The fire statistics showed that the number of Japanese forest fires remains high at 3,000 per year, most fires are caused by human activities and occur in the populated area, although the forest fires are of course mainly affected by weather conditions. Based on the analyzed fundamentals of the weather conditions together with the city related data in relation to the fire occurrence, we have developed a system to predict forest fire danger. The fire danger simulations were made, using not only previous weather conditions, but also population density data and others. The comparison between the map of predicted fire danger and the locations of real fire occurrence indicated almost reasonable agreement. In addition, CFD simulations were conducted to examine the fire progression behavior and the suppression.