  This paper presents the development of a new continuous forest fire model
implemented as a weighted local small-world network approach. This new approach
was designed to simulate fire patterns in real, heterogeneous landscapes. The
wildland fire spread is simulated on a square lattice in which each cell
represents an area of the land's surface. The interaction between burning and
non-burning cells, in the present work induced by flame radiation, may be
extended well beyond nearest neighbors. It depends on local conditions of
topography and vegetation types. An approach based on a solid flame model is
used to predict the radiative heat flux from the flame generated by the burning
of each site towards its neighbors. The weighting procedure takes into account
the self-degradation of the tree and the ignition processes of a combustible
cell through time. The model is tested on a field presenting a range of slopes
and with data collected from a real wildfire scenario. The critical behavior of
the spreading process is investigated.
