Wildfire prediction is important for early warning and resource allocation, yet existing Earth foundation models (Earth FMs) are pretrained for general atmospheric and geophysical objectives rather than wildfire forecasting. To address this gap, we introduce WILDFIRE-FM, the first foundation model pretrained specifically for wildfire prediction using weather, active-fire observations, topography, vegetation, and static environmental data. However, introducing a domain-specific backbone alone does not solve the evaluation problem: wildfire events are sparse in space and time, making transfer conclusions highly sensitive to matching rules and evaluation settings. To address this problem, we introduce a fixed-contract evaluation framework with two controlled checks: a fixed-output check for matching-rule effects and a fixed-feature check for head-selection effects. Under matched contracts, we compare WILDFIRE-FM with ten Earth-FM baselines across occupancy, spread, retrieval, and regression tasks. Our results show that wildfire transfer conclusions depend strongly on evaluation design and task formulation. We hope this framework and WILDFIRE-FM provide a foundation for future wildfire
Climate change has intensified extreme weather and wildfire conditions globally. Canada experienced record-breaking wildfires in 2023 and 2025, burning millions of hectares and severely impacting the Prairie provinces, with Manitoba facing its worst season in 30 years. These events highlight the urgent need to understand and mitigate escalating fire risks. While existing research largely focuses on wildfire management approaches, few studies have explored the relationship between user network traffic and wildfire activity, despite the potential of such correlations to provide valuable spatiotemporal insights into wildfire dynamics. This paper investigates the relationship between wildfire intensity and network performance during the 2025 Manitoba wildfire season, using Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite-derived Fire Radiative Power data and large-scale Speedtest measurements. We found statistically significant correlations between wildfire intensity and several network performance metrics in both the province-wide and region-wide case studies, as measured by Spearman's correlation coefficients ($ρ$) and corresponding p-values. Throughput-related metrics sho
Wildfires are becoming increasingly frequent, with potentially devastating consequences, including loss of life, infrastructure destruction, and severe environmental damage. Low-Earth-orbit satellites equipped with onboard sensors can capture critical information related to active wildfires and enable near-real-time detection through machine learning algorithms applied to the acquired data. We propose a framework that automates the complete wildfire detection and satellite scheduling pipeline, entitled the WildFire-applicable Intelligent and Responsive Ensemble for Detection and Scheduling (WildFIRE-DS). This paper develops an algorithm to realize the vision of the WildFIRE-DS as a proof of concept, integrating three key components: wildfire detection in satellite imagery, statistical updating that incorporates data from repeated flyovers, and multisatellite scheduling optimization. The algorithm enables wildfire detection using convolutional neural networks with sensor fusion techniques, incorporates subsequent flyover information via Bayesian statistics, and schedules a constellation of satellites using the state-of-the-art Reconfigurable Earth Observation Satellite Scheduling Pr
Canada experienced in 2023 one of the most severe wildfire seasons in recent history, causing damage across ecosystems, destroying communities, and emitting large quantities of CO2. This extreme wildfire season is symptomatic of a climate-change-induced increase in the length and severity of the fire season that affects the boreal ecosystem. Therefore, it is critical to empower wildfire management in boreal communities with better mitigation solutions. Wildfire probability maps represent an important tool for understanding the likelihood of wildfire occurrence and the potential severity of future wildfires. The massive increase in the availability of Earth observation data has enabled the development of deep learning-based wildfire forecasting models, aiming at providing precise wildfire probability maps at different spatial and temporal scales. A main limitation of such methods is their reliance on coarse-resolution environmental drivers and satellite products, leading to wildfire occurrence prediction of reduced resolution, typically around $\sim 0.1$°. This paper presents a benchmark dataset: CanadaFireSat, and baseline methods for high-resolution: 100 m wildfire forecasting acr
Intense wildfire seasons require critical prioritization decisions to allocate scarce suppression resources over a dispersed geographical area. This paper develops a predictive and prescriptive approach to jointly optimize crew assignments and wildfire suppression. The problem features a discrete resource-allocation structure with endogenous wildfire demand and non-linear wildfire dynamics. We formulate an integer optimization model with crew assignments on a time-space-rest network, wildfire dynamics on a time-state network, and linking constraints between them. We develop a two-sided branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm based on: (i) a two-sided column generation scheme that generates fire suppression plans and crew routes iteratively; (ii) a new family of cuts exploiting the knapsack structure of the linking constraints; and (iii) novel branching rules to accommodate non-linear wildfire dynamics. We also propose a data-driven double machine learning approach to estimate wildfire spread as a function of covariate information and suppression efforts, mitigating observed confounding between historical crew assignments and wildfire growth. Extensive computational experiments show that
Due to climate change and the disruption of ecosystems worldwide, wildfires are increasingly impacting environment, infrastructure, and human lives globally. Additionally, an exacerbating climate crisis means that these losses would continue to grow if preventative measures are not implemented. Though recent advancements in artificial intelligence enable wildfire management techniques, most deployed solutions focus on detecting wildfires after ignition. The development of predictive techniques with high accuracy requires extensive datasets to train machine learning models. This paper presents the California Wildfire Inventory (CAWFI), a wildfire database of over 37 million data points for building and training wildfire prediction solutions, thereby potentially preventing megafires and flash fires by addressing them before they spark. The dataset compiles daily historical California wildfire data from 2012 to 2018 and indicator data from 2012 to 2022. The indicator data consists of leading indicators (meteorological data correlating to wildfire-prone conditions), trailing indicators (environmental data correlating to prior and early wildfire activity), and geological indicators (veg
Electric power infrastructure faces increasing risk of damage and disruption due to wildfire. Operators of power grids in wildfire-prone regions must consider the potential impacts of unpredictable fires. However, traditional wildfire models do not effectively describe worst-case, or even high-impact, fire behavior. To address this issue, we propose a mixed-integer conic program to characterize an adversarial wildfire that targets infrastructure while respecting realistic fire spread dynamics. We design a wind-assisted fire spread set based on the Rothermel fire spread model and propose principled convex relaxations of this set, including a new relaxation of the inner product over Euclidean balls. We present test cases derived from the recent Park, Eaton, and Palisades fires in California and solve models to identify the minimum time-to-outage of multiple-element contingencies and the maximum load shed associated with a sequence of element outages caused by a realistic wildfire. We use the minimum time-to-outage values to screen contingencies and construct security-constrained optimal power flow models that promote operational resilience against wildfire.
Wildfires are growing in frequency and intensity, devastating ecosystems and communities while causing billions of dollars in suppression costs and economic damage annually in the U.S. Traditional wildfire management is mostly reactive, addressing fires only after they are detected. We introduce \textit{FireCastRL}, a proactive artificial intelligence (AI) framework that combines wildfire forecasting with intelligent suppression strategies. Our framework first uses a deep spatiotemporal model to predict wildfire ignition. For high-risk predictions, we deploy a pre-trained reinforcement learning (RL) agent to execute real-time suppression tactics with helitack units inside a physics-informed 3D simulation. The framework generates a threat assessment report to help emergency responders optimize resource allocation and planning. In addition, we are publicly releasing a large-scale, spatiotemporal dataset containing $\mathbf{9.5}$ million samples of environmental variables for wildfire prediction. Our work demonstrates how deep learning and RL can be combined to support both forecasting and tactical wildfire response. More details can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/firecastr
We develop a wildfire simulation model that evolves the temperature scalar field using an energy balance equation accounting for heat generation, transport, and loss. For these equations, we develop quasi-implicit time integration schemes using direction splitting of the differential operators. We use the Peaceman-Rachford and Strang splitting methods, including the Crank-Nicolson method. Based on these discretizations, we derive variational formulations and explore the Kronecker product structure of the matrices. In the wildfire model, there are some non-linear terms that we treat explicitly. We perform a detailed analysis of how treating these terms affects the stability of the time integration scheme. Namely, we show that a quasi-implicit time integration scheme achieves 10 times higher simulation accuracy. We present two wildfire simulations. The first is a simulation of the 2024 wildfire disaster in the Valparaíso region of Chile. The second one is a simulation of the 2019 wildfire disaster in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. We discuss the numerical results and compare them against satellite images and measurement records. We also present a numerical experiment for comparis
Over 8,024 wildfire incidents have been documented in 2024 alone, affecting thousands of fatalities and significant damage to infrastructure and ecosystems. Wildfires in the United States have inflicted devastating losses. Wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense, which highlights how urgently efficient warning systems are needed to avoid disastrous outcomes. The goal of this study is to enhance the accuracy of wildfire detection by using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) built on the VGG16 architecture. The D-FIRE dataset, which includes several kinds of wildfire and non-wildfire images, was employed in the study. Low-resolution images, dataset imbalance, and the necessity for real-time applicability are some of the main challenges. These problems were resolved by enriching the dataset using data augmentation techniques and optimizing the VGG16 model for binary classification. The model produced a low false negative rate, which is essential for reducing unexplored fires, despite dataset boundaries. In order to help authorities execute fast responses, this work shows that deep learning models such as VGG16 can offer a reliable, automated approach for early wildfire recogni
Accurate and rapid prediction of wildfire trends is crucial for effective management and mitigation. However, the stochastic nature of fire propagation poses significant challenges in developing reliable simulators. In this paper, we introduce PyTorchFire, an open-access, PyTorch-based software that leverages GPU acceleration. With our redesigned differentiable wildfire Cellular Automata (CA) model, we achieve millisecond-level computational efficiency, significantly outperforming traditional CPU-based wildfire simulators on real-world-scale fires at high resolution. Real-time parameter calibration is made possible through gradient descent on our model, aligning simulations closely with observed wildfire behavior both temporally and spatially, thereby enhancing the realism of the simulations. Our PyTorchFire simulator, combined with real-world environmental data, demonstrates superior generalizability compared to supervised learning surrogate models. Its ability to predict and calibrate wildfire behavior in real-time ensures accuracy, stability, and efficiency. PyTorchFire has the potential to revolutionize wildfire simulation, serving as a powerful tool for wildfire prediction and
Wildfire monitoring and prediction are essential for understanding wildfire behaviour. With extensive Earth observation data, these tasks can be integrated and enhanced through multi-task deep learning models. We present a comprehensive multi-temporal remote sensing dataset for active fire detection, daily wildfire monitoring, and next-day wildfire prediction. Covering wildfire events in the contiguous U.S. from January 2017 to October 2021, the dataset includes 3552 surface reflectance images and auxiliary data such as weather, topography, land cover, and fuel information, totalling 71 GB. The lifecycle of each wildfire is documented, with labels for active fires (AF) and burned areas (BA), supported by manual quality assurance of AF and BA test labels. The dataset supports three tasks: a) active fire detection, b) daily burned area mapping, and c) wildfire progression prediction. Detection tasks use pixel-wise classification of multi-spectral, multi-temporal images, while prediction tasks integrate satellite and auxiliary data to model fire dynamics. This dataset and its benchmarks provide a foundation for advancing wildfire research using deep learning.
The critical need for sophisticated detection techniques has been highlighted by the rising frequency and intensity of wildfires in the US, especially in California. In 2023, wildfires caused 130 deaths nationwide, the highest since 1990. In January 2025, Los Angeles wildfires which included the Palisades and Eaton fires burnt approximately 40,000 acres and 12,000 buildings, and caused loss of human lives. The devastation underscores the urgent need for effective detection and prevention strategies. Deep learning models, such as Vision Transformers (ViTs), can enhance early detection by processing complex image data with high accuracy. However, wildfire detection faces challenges, including the availability of high-quality, real-time data. Wildfires often occur in remote areas with limited sensor coverage, and environmental factors like smoke and cloud cover can hinder detection. Additionally, training deep learning models is computationally expensive, and issues like false positives/negatives and scaling remain concerns. Integrating detection systems with real-time alert mechanisms also poses difficulties. In this work, we used the wildfire dataset consisting of 10.74 GB high-reso
Recent research has demonstrated the potential of deep neural networks (DNNs) to accurately predict wildfire spread on a given day based upon high-dimensional explanatory data from a single preceding day, or from a time series of T preceding days. For the first time, we investigate a large number of existing data-driven wildfire modeling strategies under controlled conditions, revealing the best modeling strategies and resulting in models that achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy for both single-day and multi-day input scenarios, as evaluated on a large public benchmark for next-day wildfire spread, termed the WildfireSpreadTS (WSTS) benchmark. Consistent with prior work, we found that models using time-series input obtained the best overall accuracy, suggesting this is an important future area of research. Furthermore, we create a new benchmark, WSTS+, by incorporating four additional years of historical wildfire data into the WSTS benchmark. Our benchmark doubles the number of unique years of historical data, expands its geographic scope, and, to our knowledge, represents the largest public benchmark for time-series-based wildfire spread prediction.
Satellite-derived fire observations are the primary input for learning-based wildfire spread prediction, yet they are inherently incomplete due to cloud cover, smoke obscuration, and sensor artifacts. This partial observability introduces a domain gap between the clean data used to train forecasting models and the degraded inputs encountered during deployment, often leading to unreliable predictions. To address this challenge, we formulate wildfire forecasting under partial observability using a two-stage probabilistic framework that decouples observation recovery from spatiotemporal prediction. Stage-I reconstructs plausible fire maps from corrupted observations via conditional inpainting, while Stage-II models wildfire dynamics on the recovered sequences using a spatiotemporal forecasting network. We consider four network architectures for the reconstruction module-a Residual U-Net (MaskUNet), a Conditional VAE (MaskCVAE), a cross-attention Vision Transformer (MaskViT), and a discrete diffusion model (MaskD3PM)-spanning CNN-based, latent-variable, attention-based, and diffusion-based approaches. We evaluate the performance of the two-stage approach on the WildfireSpreadTS (WSTS)
Wildfires are among the most severe natural hazards, posing a significant threat to both humans and natural ecosystems. The growing risk of wildfires increases the demand for forecasting models that are not only accurate but also reliable. Deep Learning (DL) has shown promise in predicting wildfire danger; however, its adoption is hindered by concerns over the reliability of its predictions, some of which stem from the lack of uncertainty quantification. To address this challenge, we present an uncertainty-aware DL framework that jointly captures epistemic (model) and aleatoric (data) uncertainty to enhance short-term wildfire danger forecasting. In the next-day forecasting, our best-performing model improves the F1 Score by 2.3% and reduces the Expected Calibration Error by 2.1% compared to a deterministic baseline, enhancing both predictive skill and calibration. Our experiments confirm the reliability of the uncertainty estimates and illustrate their practical utility for decision support, including the identification of uncertainty thresholds for rejecting low-confidence predictions and the generation of well-calibrated wildfire danger maps with accompanying uncertainty layers.
Due to climate change, the extreme wildfire has become one of the most dangerous natural hazards to human civilization. Even though, some wildfires may be initially caused by human activity, but the spread of wildfires is mainly determined by environmental factors, for examples, (1) weather conditions such as temperature, wind direction and intensity, and moisture levels; (2) the amount and types of dry vegetation in a local area, and (3) topographic or local terrian conditions, which affects how much rain an area gets and how fire dynamics will be constrained or faciliated. Thus, to accurately forecast wildfire occurrence has become one of most urgent and taunting environmental challenges in global scale. In this work, we developed a real-time Multimodal Transformer Neural Network Machine Learning model that combines several advanced artificial intelligence techniques and statistical methods to practically forecast the occurrence of wildfire at the precise location in real time, which not only utilizes large scale data information such as hourly weather forecasting data, but also takes into account small scale topographical data such as local terrain condition and local vegetation
Wildfires propagate through intricate interactions between wind, fuel, and terrain, resulting in complex behaviors that pose challenges for accurate predictions. This study investigates the interaction between wind velocity topology and wildfire spread dynamics, aiming to enhance our understanding of wildfire spread patterns. We revisited the non-dimensionalizion of the governing combustion model by incorporating three distinct time scales. This approach revealed two new non-dimensional numbers, contrasting with the conventional non-dimensionalization that considers only a single time scale. Through scaling analysis, we analytically identified the critical determinants of transient wildfire behavior and established a state-neutral curve, indicating where initial wildfires extinguish for specific combinations of the identified non-dimensional numbers. Subsequently, a wildfire transport solver was developed using a finite difference method, integrating compact schemes and implicit-explicit Runge-Kutta methods. We explored the influence of stable and unstable manifolds in wind velocity on wildfire transport under steady wind conditions defined using a saddle-type fixed point flow, emp
Wildfire impacts on US communities have escalated in recent decades, highlighting the need to better understand factors that influence wildfire outcomes. We find that 567,000 homes were exposed to wildfires across the contiguous US during 2001-2020, two-thirds of which occurred and increased five-fold in the Western US. While residential structure survivability - the percent of structures within a wildfire perimeter that survive the fire - remained stable in the Eastern US in the past two decades, it declined by 10% in the West. Survivability was explained by structural age, surrounding fuels, and fire weather. Survivability was 87% for homes built pre-1990 compared to 92% for post-1990 homes in the West. Survivability was lowest in forests compared to grasslands and shrublands. Finally, survivability was markedly lower for fires coincident with extreme fire weather. Our results suggest that modern building codes, fuel management, and proactive planning can strengthen wildfire resilience.
Natural wildfire becomes increasingly frequent as climate change evolves, posing a growing threat to power systems, while grid failures simultaneously fuel the most destructive wildfires. Preemptive de-energization of grid equipment is effective in mitigating grid-induced wildfires but may cause significant power outages during natural wildfires. This paper proposes a novel two-stage stochastic program for planning preemptive de-energization and solves it via an enhanced Lagrangian cut decomposition algorithm. We model wildfire events as stochastic disruptions with random magnitude and timing. The stochastic program maximizes the electricity delivered while proactively de-energizing components over multiple time periods to reduce wildfire risks. We use a cellular automaton process to sample grid failure and wildfire scenarios driven by realistic risk and environmental factors. We test our method on an augmented version of the RTS-GLMC test case in Southern California and compare it with four benchmark cases, including deterministic, wait-and-see, and robust optimization formulations as well as a comparison with prior wildfire risk optimization. Our method reduces wildfire damage co