Why does FARSITE seem to over predict fire growth rates?
A11. The general reason is that the scale of the input data that describe the fire environment to the models is very coarse compared the scale of the real fire environment that affects the actual fire. This means that the fire behavior models are fed very homogenous data (spatial and temporal) that produce equilibrium values that are too fast for the real heterogeneous environment. For example, we input winds at an hourly interval but know that in reality the winds are highly variable. The nonlinear response of the fire behavior models to wind means that the average wind value does NOT produce the average fire behavior value. Another example is the assumed fuel homogeneity at the resolution of the input raster data (say 30m). The raster landscape data contain no variation in the fuel data finer than 30m, but in reality most fuels are more heterogeneous, having areas within each 30m cell that have more, less, faster, and slower fuel types. This heterogeneity keeps the actual fire changi
