## 5 Real Case  
In this section, we present the simulation of a real wildfire with the current PhyFire version, which includes the flame temperature and height submodels, as well as fire-spotting. We selected this wildfire for two reasons: firstly because we have all the relevant information of this fire, which was documented by the coordinator of the fire-suppression operations in [67], and, secondly, because the extensive photo-guide [34] provides us suitable information about the characteristics of the fuel types of the simulation area. This wildfire occurred in Osono, Ourense province, in the autonomous region of Galicia in north-western Spain, on 17 August 2009. The fire ignited at 3:45 p.m. local time near the motorway bridge. The firefighting team had failed to stabilize the fire by 11:00 p.m. on the same day, but brought it under control at 3:45 a.m. on the following day, finally extinguishing it at 9:10 p.m. on 18 August. The fire burned 224 ha:185 ha of forest area (83 ha were tree-covered interspersed with heath) and 39 ha of agricultural area. The fuel data were obtained from the IFN4 with the fuel type distribution according to the NFFL classification [61], adapted to Spanish forestry by the Nature Conservation Institute [68]. The initial burnt area was covered mainly with Pinus pinaster corresponding to Model 7 (inflammable brush); the middle area was covered with Model 6 (dormant brush) and, to a lesser extent, Model 2 (timber grass). The end burnt area was covered with diverse fuel types, mainly Model 5 (brush). Figure 2 shows the fuel type distribution, as well as the existing fuelbreaks, roads, rivers, and particularly interesting, a wide fuelbreak (20 m wide) along the crests that the actual fire crossed, as did the simulation. As can be seen in the contour lines of Figure 2, for the first hours, the fire spread over an uneven surface, with positive and negative discontinuous slopes, with watersheds and river basins; for the final part, although the altitude is higher, the surface is relatively flat, and the terrain is more accessible for firefighter teams. The firefighting team carried out a series of actions to prevent the fire from reaching the municipality of Osono, establishing a set of firebreaks by widening the existing roads on the southern flank of the fire. Figure 2 also shows the three firebreaks (blue lines) the firefighters made. We did not consider in the simulation the actions of the fire truck water tanks on both flanks during the last part of the fire. We simulated the first and most-complicated hours of this real fire, specifically 4 h and 15 min, updating the wind data (wind speed and direction) every hour and providing graphic results of the burnt area and fire front every 15 min. The simulation area was a rectangle measuring 3320 m \(\times\) 2745 m; the cartographic spatial resolution was 5 m; and the finite-element mesh resolution was 7.5 m. The whole simulation involved about 150 s of computational time on a laptop equipped with an Intel i7 processor (two cores, each one working at a frequency of 3.50 GHz) and 16 GB RAM. This same example was included in [17], achieving an eight-times lower computational cost. This means that the current version of the model allows simulating one hour of a real fire, like the one in the example, in one minute on a standard computer, which is highly competitive. In fact, although the computational cost depends on the size of the simulation area, the option of using different resolution levels enables the model to maintain a highly competitive computational cost in all types of simulations. The three model parameter values for this simulation were as follows: mean absorption coefficient \(a=0.095\) m\({}^{-1}\), natural convection coefficient \(H=15\) Js\({}^{-1}\)m\({}^{-2}\)\(K^{-1}\), and  
Figure 2: Simulation area (black rectangle), contour lines, fire ignition point, IFN4 fuel type distribution, actual final perimeter (red line), and firefighters’ firebreaks (blue lines). correction factor of convective term \(\beta=0.015\).