arXiv AI

Interpretable Patch-Based Deep Learning for Wildfire Spread Prediction from Ensemble Simulations

The study evaluates deep learning surrogates for wildfire spread prediction, training four architectures on 10,584 high‑resolution simulations from Catalonia. Results show that only surface fuel load significantly predicts burn probability, and convolutional models mainly use distance to the fire front while a transformer model emphasizes fuel and terrain. When applied to a new region without retraining, the models still perform reasonably, with only a modest accuracy drop.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Modular Deep Learning Mechanisms for Auditable Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction

The paper presents modular deep learning augmentations for next‑day wildfire spread prediction, including wind‑ and slope‑conditioned attention biases, physics‑feature retrieval‑augmented output correction, and fire‑conditioned dual‑stream gating. These modules are evaluated on five backbone models using the Next Day Wildfire Spread benchmark, with staged ablations, directional audits, retrieval perturbations, calibration measures, and computational comparisons. The best augmented SwinUNETR model achieves an F1 score of 0.4216 and an AUC‑PR of 0.3673, while a mixed ensemble reaches 0.4292 and 0.3790, demonstrating that predictive performance, operational trustworthiness, and computational practicality can be simultaneously improved.

By Miguel Esparza, Aydin Ayanzadeh Ahmad Mousavi, Ali Mostafavi
arXiv AI
Oct 26

Accelerating Wildfire Hazard Mapping Across Canada with an AI Surrogate Modelling Framework

The paper introduces an AI surrogate modelling framework that accelerates wildfire hazard mapping across Canada. By training a multi‑task deep learning model on national‑scale data, the surrogate reproduces key outputs of the computationally intensive BurnP3+ simulator—burn probability, mean fire intensity, and mean rate of spread—in seconds instead of days or weeks. The framework includes standardized training, fine‑tuning, and evaluation protocols, domain‑specific metrics, and counterfactual evaluation to ensure robust out‑of‑distribution performance, achieving up to 806‑fold CPU speed‑up and 13% memory usage compared to the original simulator.

By Hager Radi Abdelwahed, Toluwaleke Olutayo, Chirag Goel, Jana Osea, Aldo Zaimi, Tom Swystun, Sandy Erni, Francisco Emiliano Lopez Saavedra, Yan Boulanger, Ga\'etan Marceau Caron
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

Evaluating Machine Learning Models for Post-Wildfire Debris-Flow Prediction

arXiv:2608. 05265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prediction of post-wildfire debris flows is critical for mitigating hazards to communities, infrastructure, and resources during intense rainfall in recently burned areas.

By Quinn Ledingham, Zhengsen Xu, Yimin Zhu, Zack Dewis, Mabel Heffring, Saeid Taleghanidoozdoozan, Motasem Alkayid, Megan Greenwood, Lincoln Linlin Xu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

ShearFuse-UNet: Hadamard, DCT, and Shearlet Transform Fusion for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction

ShearFuse-UNet is a lightweight deep learning model designed for next‑day wildfire spread prediction using multi‑modal satellite data. It incorporates three transform‑domain branches—Fast Walsh‑Hadamard Transform, Discrete Cosine Transform, and a cone‑adapted digital Shearlet residual—within each encoder block of a U‑Net backbone, fusing spectral representations via a learned SpectralFusion gate and adding Shearlet reconstruction as a residual. On the WildfireSpreadTS dataset, the model achieves an F1 score of 0.596 with only 267k parameters, outperforming a larger ResNet18‑based U‑Net and demonstrating a favorable accuracy‑efficiency trade‑off, with additional validation on the Google Next‑Day Wildfire Spread dataset.

By Ene Meco, Yingyi Luo, Emadeldeen Hamdan, Adam Watts, Ahmet Enis Cetin
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Toward Generalizable Deep Learning Based Peatland Fire Detection via Walsh Hadamard Transform and Domain Adaptation

arXiv:2603.02465v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning-based wildfire detection has advanced significantly using deep learning models trained on large wildfire image and video dat...

By Emadeldeen Hamdan, Ahmad Faiz Tharima, Mohd Zahirasri Mohd Tohir, Dayang Nur Sakinah Musa, Erdem Koyuncu, Adam J. Watts, Ahmet Enis Cetin
arXiv AI
Sep 30

PyroStack: A Multi-Band Spatio-Temporal Sub-Daily Dataset for Wildfires in the United States

arXiv:2609.36315v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wildfires are an increasing hazard to ecosystems, air quality, and human systems, creating a growing need for datasets that support systematic develo...

By Arya Kondur, Giosue Migliorini, Cameron Schmitt, Francesco Immorlano, Tairan Wang, Rebecca C. Scholten, Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Gary Johnson, Chris Lautenberger, Valentin Waeselynck, J. Shane Romsos, Kasra Shamsaei, Alejandro Tejedor, Tianjia Liu, Yang Chen, Padhraic Smyth, James T. Randerson
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Deep Learning Imputation of Missing Radius of Maximum Winds (Rmax) Values in Tropical Cyclone Best-Track Data

arXiv:2608. 09683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Probabilistic coastal hazard assessments require accurate characterization of tropical cyclone (TC) parameters, yet datasets often contain missing records for the radius of maximum winds (Rmax), a key variable in Joint Probability Method analyses.

By Swastik Agrawal, Nishkal Hundia, Ziyue Liu, Michelle Bensi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

WildfireSpreadBench: The Metric Decides the Model in Wildfire Spread Prediction

WildfireSpreadBench evaluates machine‑learning models for predicting next‑day wildfire spread, comparing five discriminative and one generative architecture on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset. The study shows that model rankings differ markedly when using Average Precision versus threshold‑dependent metrics such as F1 and IoU, revealing three distinct prediction profiles—over‑predicting, balanced, and under‑predicting—that AP alone cannot distinguish. Expanding input channels modestly affected AP, underscoring that AP may favor models with predictions poorly suited for operational use.

By Arin Gopakumar, Marco Pannozzo
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Evaluating and improving crop-yield forecasting methods during extreme drought

The study evaluates crop‑yield forecasting methods for the 2012 Midwestern US drought, comparing non‑deep learning machine learning models with a deep learning model (VITA) using 16 meteorological predictors. It highlights challenges such as distributional dissimilarity between training and test data, spatial and temporal sparsity, and demonstrates that sample weighting and feature selection improve non‑deep learning models but not VITA. The work contrasts deep versus non‑deep learning approaches and shows how modifications can mitigate issues arising from extreme drought conditions.

By Shrey Gupta, Yi Ming, George Mohler