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≪ 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≫ L−μ with μ≈ 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.
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BibTeX
@misc{hebertdufresne2026intermittency,
title = {{Intermittency in Wind-Driven Fires}},
author = {Laurent Hébert-Dufresne and Aanjaneya Kumar and S. Redner},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.22541},
eprint = {2609.22541},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22541},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Intermittency in Wind-Driven Fires
AU - Laurent Hébert-Dufresne
AU - Aanjaneya Kumar
AU - S. Redner
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.22541
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22541
AB - 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≪ 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≫ L^−μ with μ≈ 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.
ER -