Cellular Automata Simulation of forest fire behavior on Italian landscape: the case of Sardinia

We used a Cellular Automata (CA) modeling framework to simulate the evolution of two small-size wildland fires that broke up in Sardinia, Italy in the summer of 2010. The CA model is based on our established detailed model that has been shown to approximate adequately the evolution of large-scale wildfires in Greece. The modified simplified model takes into account the landscape characteristics, the distribution of flammability and detailed wind field data. Simulation results over an ensemble of lattice realizations show that the model captures qualitatively the actual data; however, significant quantitative differences between simulations and real patterns do exist for very small sizes of burned area. Comparing model results with data obtained from Greece, where simulations succeeded to approximate quite well the spatio-temporal evolution of the fires, we suggest that the obtained discrepancies are due to the small size of the fires.