Abstract
With climate change expected to exacerbate fire weather conditions, the accurate and timely anticipation of wildfires becomes increasingly crucial for disaster mitigation. In this study, we utilize SeasFire, a comprehensive global wildfire dataset with climate, vegetation, oceanic indices, and human-related variables, to enable seasonal wildfire forecasting with machine learning. For the predictive analysis, we present FireCastNet, a novel architecture which combines a 3D convolutional encoder with GraphCast, originally developed for global short-term weather forecasting using graph neural networks. FireCastNet is trained to capture the context leading to wildfires, at different spatial and temporal scales. Our investigation focuses on assessing the effectiveness of our model in predicting the presence of burned areas at varying forecasting time horizons globally, extending up to six months into the future, and on how different spatial or/and temporal context affects the performance. Our findings demonstrate the potential of deep learning models in seasonal fire forecasting; longer input time-series leads to more robust predictions, while integrating spatial information to capture wildfire spatio-temporal dynamics boosts performance. Finally, our results hint that in order to enhance performance at longer forecasting horizons, a larger receptive field spatially needs to be considered.
Dimitrios Michail
Associate Professor @ HUA
Adjunct Researcher @ OrionLab
My research interests include Graph Algorithms, Graph Mining, Machine Learning, Algorithm Engineering.
Ioannis Prapas
PhD Candidate
My research interests include Deep Learning, Earth Observation, Wildfire Forecasting, Modeling Earth System Dynamics.
Spyros Kondylatos
PhD Candidate
My research interests include Deep Learning, Bayesian Deep Learning, Earth Observation, Natural Hazards, Wildfires Forecasting
Nikolaos-Ioannis Bountos
PhD Candidate
Ioannis Papoutsis
Head of Orion Lab
Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation @ NTUA
Adjunct Researcher @ NOA
Earth Observation, Machine Learning, Natural Hazard Monitoring