Advanced Global Wildfire Activity Modeling with Hierarchical Graph ODE

Abstract: Wildfires, as an integral component of the Earth system, are governed by a complex interplay of atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial processes spanning a vast range of spatiotemporal scales. Modeling their global activity on large timescales is therefore a critical yet challenging task. While deep learning has recently achieved significant breakthroughs in global weather forecasting, its potential for global wildfire behavior prediction remains underexplored. In this work, we reframe this problem and introduce the Hierarchical Graph ODE (HiGO), a novel framework designed to learn the multi-scale, continuous-time dynamics of wildfires. Specifically, we represent the Earth system as a multi-level graph hierarchy and propose an adaptive filtering message passing mechanism for both intra- and inter-level information flow, enabling more effective feature extraction and fusion. Furthermore, we incorporate GNN-parameterized Neural ODE modules at multiple levels to explicitly learn the continuous dynamics inherent to each scale. Through extensive experiments on the SeasFire Cube dataset, we demonstrate that HiGO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on long-range wildfire forecasting. Moreover, its continuous-time predictions exhibit strong observational consistency, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.