Toward Quantifying the Source Term for Predicting Global Climatic Effects of Nuclear War: Applications of Urban Fire Codes

摘要

Calculating urban-area fire development is critical to estimating global smoke production effects due to nuclear warfare. To improve calculations of fire starts and spread in urban areas, we performed a parameter-sensitivity analysis using three codes from IIT Research Institute. We applied improved versions of the codes to two urban areas: an infinite ''uniform city'' with only one type of building and the ''San Jose urban area'' as of the late 1960s. We varied parameters and compared affected fuel consumption and areas with a baseline case. The dominant parameters for the uniform city were wind speed, atmospheric visibility, frequency of secondary fire starts, building density, and window sizes. For San Jose (1968), they were wind speed, building densities, location of ground zero (GZ), height of burst (HOB), window sizes, and brand range. Because some results are very sensitive to actual fuel-distribution characteristics and the attack scenario, it is not possible to use a uniform city to represent actual urban areas. This was confirmed by a few calculations for the Detroit area as of the late 1960s. Many improvements are needed, such as inclusion of fire-induced winds and debris fires, before results can be extrapolated to the global scale. (ERA citation 10:048001)