A heat transfer model of crown scorch in forest fires
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Van Wagner crown scorch model is widely used to estimate crown component necroses in surface fires. The model is based on buoyant plume theory but accounts for crown heat transfer processes using an empirical proportionality factor k. Crown scorch estimates have used k values for foliage, but k varies with heat transfer characteristics, and branch and bud necroses are more relevant to tree mortality. This paper derives and validates a more physically complete model of crown scorch in surface fires (I ≤ 2500 kW·m –1 ). The model links a buoyant plume model with a lumped capacitance heat transfer analysis applicable to branches, buds, and foliage (~1 cm maximum diameter). The lumped capacitance analysis is validated with vegetative-bud heating experiments, and the entire heat transfer model of crown scorch is validated with fireline intensity and foliage necrosis data. The model is more general than the Van Wagner model and is independent of experimental fire data. Predictions require measurements of fireline intensity, residence time, ambient temperature, and five thermophysical properties of crown components. The model predicts differences between bud and foliage necrosis heights, and illustrates why heat transfer processes should be considered in crown scorch models.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".