Estimation of potential wildfire behavior characteristics to assess wildfire danger in southwest China using deep learning schemes

Abstract

Accurate estimation of potential wildfire behavior characteristics (PWBC) can improve wildfire danger assessment. However, wildfire behavior has been estimated by most fire spread models with immeasurable uncertainties and difficulties in large-scale applications. In this study, a PWBC estimation model (named PWBC-QR-BiLSTM) was proposed by coupling the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and quantile regression (QR) methods. Multi-source data, including fuel, weather, topography, infrastructure, and landscape variables, were input into the PWBC-QR-BiLSTM model to estimate the potential rate of spread (ROS) and fire radiative power (FRP) over western Sichuan of China, and then to estimate the probability density of ROS and FRP. Daily ROS and FRP were extracted from the Global Fire Atlas and the MOD14A1/MYD14A1 product. The optimal PWBC-QR-BiLSTM model was determined using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm Ⅱ (NAGA-Ⅱ). Results showed that the PWBC-QR-BiLSTM performed well in estimating potential ROS and FRP with high accuracy (ROS: R² > 0.7 and MAPE<30%, FRP: R² > 0.8 and MAPE<25%). The modal PWBC values extracted from the estimated probability density were closer to the observed values, which can be regarded as a good indicator for wildfire danger assessment. The variable importance analysis also verified that fuel and infrastructure variables played an important role in driving wildfire behavior. This study suggests the potential of utilizing artificial intelligence to estimate PWBC and its probability density to improve the guidance on wildfire management.

Keywords: Bi-directional long short-term memory; Deep learning; Potential wildfire behavior characteristic; Probability density; Quantile regression; Wildfire danger assessment.