Advancing Time Series Wildfire Spread Prediction: Modeling Improvements and the WSTS+ Benchmark

Abstract: 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. Here, we introduce a variety of modeling improvements 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. 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.