Intermittency in Wind-Driven Fires

Abstract

We construct a wind-driven forest-fire model in one dimension in which a fire can jump gaps between trees to ignite disjoint downwind forests. The size of a gap that a fire can jump depends on the fire intensity, which increases as the fire propagates through trees and diminishes as the fire jumps gaps. Trees grow on empty sites at rate $r$ and lightning strikes each site with rate $f$. When $f\ll r/L$, where $L$ is the system length, lightning is sufficiently rare that quasi-deterministic dynamics arises where all trees are consumed when a lightning-induced fire occurs. For $f\gg L^{-μ}$ with $μ\approx 0.8$, lightning is sufficiently frequent that a steady state is reached, but with unexpected behaviors for the forest- and gap-size distributions. Intermittency arises in between these regimes, with coexisting temporal domains of deterministic and chaotic dynamics.