Numerical simulation of forest fires and possibilities to estimate aerosol emission: Recent advances

Forest fires produce many different pollutants, including soot formation and aerosol emissions. Air pollution from wildfires leads to cardiopulmonary disease and impacts on the environment and carbon cycle. Emissions of soot and aerosols from forest fires need to be assessed. The following methods exist for estimating aerosol emissions: numerical, experimental and empirical. The purpose of the review is to summarize and analyze various numerical models for simulating forest fires to estimate aerosol emissions. This review provides information on various physical, geometric, artificial intelligence, empirical, cellular automation and graph models. These models are summarized and analyzed in terms of various parameters. The review also provides some discussions and suggestions for future research. Conclusions are drawn to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of various mathematical models. •The majority of forest fire spread models are based on various cellular automata and the Rothermell geometric approaches.•Physical-based forest fire mathematical models were intensively developed at the end of XX century and in the XXI century.•Geographically, there has been a recent dominance of Chinese developments in the study of the spread of forest fires.•Cellular automata models applicable to compute aerosol emissions accompanied by emission factor and fuel classification data.