Project goal

The standard model for wildfire size distributions is a power law, building on seminal results from statistical physics and self-organized criticality. But does this theory hold water in an empirical setting? To test this hypothesis, we leverage a comprehensive dataset of US wildfires and fit a suite of statistical distributions to the size distribution of fires across a number of biome types. The goal of this work is to understand in what settings the classic theoretical model holds, and under what circumstances will a power law distribution fail to fit the data as well as some other distribution. This work can inform theoreticians on new and exciting avenues for theoretical model development and inspire practitioners to rethink their assumptions about the size distribution of US wildfires.

Collaborators

B. B. Cael, Tyler Karp, Mary Sibler, and Luke von Kapff (now @ Boston Consulting Group).