, 13 September 2017
Image: Wikimedia commons/80 trading 24 CC-BY-SA
Bushfires are destructive and dangerous. They can be fickle, but scientists are developing ways to predict their behaviour. This activity shows you one way that a scientist might think about bushfires.
Forests aren’t usually shaped like a line – they cover areas. And that means fire can spread north, south, east or west. So let’s try a slightly different simulation.
This is a very simple simulation, but it’s based on real science. Many bushfire simulations work on a grid system, and use probabilities to work out whether the fire will spread further. However, they also take into account real world factors such as wind speed, temperature and the amount of vegetation.
In the first simulation, the house is pretty safe. The only way for it to burn down is if you get four heads in a row, which has only about a six per cent chance! But that doesn’t mean it’s completely safe – when we tried the first simulation, the house burnt down on the first try.
The second simulation should be more likely to burn down the house, because there are more paths for the fire to follow. Each fire square has more neighbours to spread to, so there is more chance the fire will continue to burn. The house is still relatively safe, though – it took us 10 attempts for it to burn down.
The fire would be more dangerous again if you tried running a similar simulation on a grid of hexagons. Hexagons have six neighbours where squares only have four. That means a hexagon grid is more connected, and the fire will spread further and faster.
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