Chief Jeff Bowman of the San Diego Fire Department said there were six fire fronts in the county, from the Mexican border to Valley Center, near Escondido.
The results of these simulations showed that the merging of two fire fronts can result in a quick increase in fire-line intensity or in flame height.
The ability of BIRD to resolve individual fire fronts further allows the first accurate calculation of 'radiative' fireline intensity from spaceborne measurements, providing values of 15 75 kJ s−1 m−1 for fire fronts that are up to 9 km in length.
Results from the two-dimensional and three-dimensional simulations were used to investigate how the two fire fronts interact together and mutually modify, or not, their own behaviour before merging.
The objective of this paper was to evaluate the potential for fully physical fire models to simulate the interactions between two converging fire fronts (a head fire and a back fire), in conditions similar to those encountered during suppression fire operations.
They were being aided by 17 helicopters and a number of fixed-wing aircraft, including huge DC-10 bombers filled with fire retardant that made repeated assaults on the fire fronts.
