**5. Conclusions**

This work aimed to assess the ability of a coupled fire–atmosphere WRF-SFIRE LES model to simulate a case study of fire smoke plume growth and dispersion. We examined the L2G burn from the RxCADRE 2012 campaign—a comprehensive experiment combining simultaneous monitoring of fuel, fire behavior, meteorology and emissions.

Our model evaluation demonstrates good overall agreemen<sup>t</sup> between the LES and the observations, subject to accuracy and timeliness of model initialization data. Using the emissions and dispersion data collected from an airborne platform during the RxCADRE experiment, we show that LES reasonably captures the timing, rise and dispersion of the fire plume. We examined the possible relationships among model biases, fire behavior and changes in ambient atmospheric conditions.

The work demonstrates the utility of WRF-SFIRE LES in studying some aspects of fire plume dynamics. The scarcity of detailed plume observations presents one of the central challenges for smoke-model development. WRF-SFIRE's ability to capture the rise and spread of fire emissions for cases such as studied here has the potential to address this critical research need and provide alternative "synthetic" data for future development of parameterizations for wildfire smoke plume rise.

**Supplementary Materials:** The following are available online at http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/10/10/5 79/s1, Animation S1: WRF-SFIRE simulated fire and smoke over real terrain. Visualization produced using VAPOR software. Animation S2: Cross section of WRF-SFIRE simulated emissions along mean wind direction. WRF-SFIRE\_init\_files.zip: All files required to initialize and run the model simulation.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, N.M. and R.S.; Formal analysis, N.M.; Funding acquisition, R.S.; Methodology, N.M.; Resources, R.S.; Supervision, R.S.; Visualization, N.M.; Writing—original draft, N.M.; and Writing—review and editing, R.S.

**Funding:** This work was funded by grants from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and BC Clean Air Research Fund (CLEAR).

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to acknowledge Brian Potter, Ronan Paugam, Ruddy Mell, Derek McNaran and Adam Kochanski for their input and collaboration. Thanks are also given to Daisuke Seto and Craig Clements for their help with obtaining RxCADRE sounding data and the UBC Weather Research and Forecasting Team for their ongoing support.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
