Aerial Wildfire Containment (2D)

Fire Conditions

Wind speed 18 km/h

Wind direction 75°

Fuel load Moderate

Retardant Budget

Remaining 100%

Aircraft loaded. Draw a containment line ahead of the ignition point, then ignite the fire.

Live Readout

Burned area

0.0%

Contained area

0.0%

Elapsed (sim time)

0.0 s

Active fire front

0 cells

How it works

The forest is a grid of cells, each holding a fuel load (how much flammable material is there) and a flame-front state (unburned / burning / burned). Every simulation tick, each burning cell tries to ignite its unburned neighbours with a probability built from a simplified Rothermel-style spread-rate model: rate ∝ fuel load × wind factor, where the wind factor grows sharply for neighbours downwind and shrinks for neighbours upwind or crosswind — this is why real fires stretch into a long downwind tongue rather than growing as a neat circle.

Real aerial firefighting rarely dumps retardant straight onto the flames — by the time a tanker arrives the front has usually moved. The actual tactic is to build a containment line: a strip of fire-retardant chemical laid down ahead of the advancing front, across its predicted path. Retardant doesn't extinguish anything by itself — it coats the fuel and drives its flammability toward zero, so when the fire front reaches that strip it starves for fuel and the front there stalls.

That makes placement and timing the whole game: a line drawn behind the front, parallel to it instead of across its path, or finished too late while the front is already crossing, does nothing — the fire simply flows around or through the gap. A line drawn early, angled across the wind-driven direction of travel, and closed with no gaps starves the front and the burn stops growing (contained). Your retardant budget is limited, just like a real tanker's payload, so a wide sweeping line costs more coverage per metre than a tight line placed precisely across the front's actual heading.

Burning Burned Retardant line Unburned fuel