Forest fires can devastate communities with incredible speed. They have caused great damage in the past and will forever, unless some course of action is taken. This project aims to take the first steps, model the movement of the fire. By modeling that, fire fighters will be able to better fight the fire.

This project involved a major research portion. There has been a lot of research done in the past, but there still isn’t enough information to make a model that would be perfectly accurate. Even the most trivial factors could dramatically change the course of the fire. Intense field research would need to be conducted in order to create the perfect program. Time and resources did not permit such research to be conducted, so I decided to model and create the program using approximate equations and formulas. Later, once field research has been done, they could be replaced with better and more accurate representations of the situation.

Forest fires are very hard to model; this may be why there are not many models of them. Once fires reach a certain size, they are able to create their own winds and weather, which could in turn allow them to expand. This is due in part to the pressure changes occurring in the vicinity as a result of the fire. Such problems as these arose as the mathematical model was developed. Therefore, instead of modeling all of the fire’s factors at once, I took only wind and first incorporated it into the project. This way, I would have a starting point and also be able to expand on the original program.

At the beginning of the project, I intended to use Java, but later in the project, I switched to Visual Basic. This allowed for a much better and easier to program GUI.