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Synonym

Rothermel’s reaction intensity

Definition

Fire intensity is defined as the rate of heat energy released by the fire, and more precisely, the energy released per unit time per unit area of actively burning fire is also called fire front (kW m−2). It is closely related to the amount of fuel available to burn.

Introduction

Fire intensity describes the combustion process of energy release from forest fuel during various phases of a fire. One of the problems with fire intensity is that it is often used incorrectly to evaluate fire impacts on vegetation, especially when the user restricts its usage to a single measure of energy output (Keeley 2009). The most useful descriptor used by fire managers and fire behavior scientists is the Byram’s fire intensity (Byram 1959), which is currently used as fireline intensity. For instance, fireline intensityhas become one of the standard criteria by which firefighters estimate the difficulty of controlling a wildfire. As fire effects cannot...

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Correspondence to Jean Louis Rossi .

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Rossi, J.L., Chatelon, F.J., Marcelli, T. (2019). Fire Intensity. In: Manzello, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Wildfires and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51727-8_51-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51727-8_51-1

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