Forest Fires: An Example of Self-Organized Critical Behavior
- 18 September 1998
- journal article
- other
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 281 (5384) , 1840-1842
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.281.5384.1840
Abstract
Despite the many complexities concerning their initiation and propagation, forest fires exhibit power-law frequency-area statistics over many orders of magnitude. A simple forest fire model, which is an example of self-organized criticality, exhibits similar behavior. One practical implication of this result is that the frequency-area distribution of small and medium fires can be used to quantify the risk of large fires, as is routinely done for earthquakes.Keywords
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