A Neural Emulator for Uncertainty Estimation of Fire Propagation

Abstract: Wildfire propagation is a highly stochastic process where small changes in environmental conditions (such as wind speed and direction) can lead to large changes in observed behaviour. A traditional approach to quantify uncertainty in fire-front progression is to generate probability maps via ensembles of simulations. However, use of ensembles is typically computationally expensive, which can limit the scope of uncertainty analysis. To address this, we explore the use of a spatio-temporal neural-based modelling approach to directly estimate the likelihood of fire propagation given uncertainty in input parameters. The uncertainty is represented by deliberately perturbing the input weather forecast during model training. The computational load is concentrated in the model training process, which allows larger probability spaces to be explored during deployment. Empirical evaluations indicate that the proposed model achieves comparable fire boundaries to those produced by the traditional SPARK simulation platform, with an overall Jaccard index (similarity score) of 67.4% on a set of 35 simulated fires. When compared to a related neural model (emulator) which was employed to generate probability maps via ensembles of emulated fires, the proposed approach produces competitive Jaccard similarity scores while being approximately an order of magnitude faster.