Wildfire Forecasting

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Overview

Wildfire forecasting estimates fire occurrence, spread, size, intensity, and related impacts such as smoke, helping support preparedness, resource allocation, and evacuation decisions. Methods combine satellite observations with weather, terrain, vegetation, and fuel data using models such as CNNs and U-Nets, transformers, graph neural networks, and cellular automata; physics-guided and probabilistic models aim to represent fire dynamics and uncertainty. Evaluation spans satellite-based benchmarks, held-out fire seasons and regions, and comparisons with simulations, using measures of detection, spatial overlap, calibration, and false alarms. A central challenge is making forecasts reliable across places and changing conditions while aligning metrics with operational needs, especially when fires are rare and missed events and false alarms have different costs.

Latest papers

CardsList

27 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. FireGraphNet: Sub-daily wildfire spread prediction with directed graph neural networks

    Oct 13, 2026Aiyshwariya Paulvannan Kanmani, Miguel Esparza, Ali MostafaviWildfire ForecastingSpatiotemporal GNNs

    Urban Resilience.AI Lab, Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77840, United States of America

  2. Probabilistic Forecasting of Wildfire Size Using Conditional Flow Matching

    Oct 11, 2026Isaac Lee, Bryan Shaddy, Assad OberaiWildfire ForecastingProbabilistic Forecasting

    Department of Mathematics, University of Southern California · Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, University of Southern California

  3. A Graph Neural Network for Global Daily Fire Radiative Power Prediction at Medium-Range Lead Times

    Oct 8, 2026Li Zhang, Jun Wang, Isidora Jankov +6Wildfire Forecasting

    CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, US · Global Systems Laboratory, OAR/NOAA, Boulder, CO, US · NOAA/NWS/OMD, College Park, MD, US +2

  4. AI4Fire: Evaluating Large Language Models on Wildfire Tasks

    Oct 7, 2026Yue Zhao, Zuobin Xiong, Xiyang Hu +3LLM EvaluationLLM Grounding

    University of Southern California · University of Nevada, Las Vegas · Arizona State University +1

  5. PyroStack: A Multi-Band Spatio-Temporal Sub-Daily Dataset for Wildfires in the United States

    Sep 28, 2026Arya Kondur, Giosue Migliorini, Cameron Schmitt +14Wildfire ForecastingSpatiotemporal Forecasting

    Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA · Department of Statistics, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA +6

  6. When local gains fail to transfer: Frozen Earth-observation embeddings across wildfires

    Sep 28, 2026Philipp Stark, Alexandros Sopasakis, Ola HallGeospatial Foundation ModelsGeospatial Representation Learning

    Department of Human Geography Lund University Sölvegatan 10, SE-223 62 Lund, Sweden · Centre for Mathematical Sciences Lund University Sölvegatan 18, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden

  7. Interpretable Patch-Based Deep Learning for Wildfire Spread Prediction from Ensemble Simulations

    Sep 16, 2026Marcin Lawenda, Aleksandra Krasicka, David Caballero +2Neural Surrogate ModelingWildfire Forecasting

    Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, Poznań, Poland · MeteoGrid, Madrid, Spain · Technical University of Czestochowa, Częstochowa, Poland

  8. Modular Deep Learning Mechanisms for Auditable Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction

    Sep 15, 2026Miguel Esparza, Aydin Ayanzadeh, Ahmad Mousavi +1Wildfire ForecastingSpatiotemporal Forecasting

    Urban Resilience.AI Lab, Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA

  9. Random Forest-Informed Cellular Automaton for Large-Scale Wildfire Spread Modelling

    Sep 1, 2026Siyu Chen, Esha Saha, Hao WangCellular AutomataWildfire Forecasting

  10. WildfireSpreadBench: The Metric Decides the Model in Wildfire Spread Prediction

    Aug 29, 2026Arin Gopakumar, Marco PannozzoWildfire ForecastingForecasting Benchmarks

    UC Berkeley · Purdue University

  11. Evaluating the Generalizability of Foundation Models for Extreme Environmental Events: Case Study of California Wildfire PM2.5

    Jul 8, 2026Yongcan Huang, Li Jiang, Ze Yu LiuWildfire ForecastingOOD Generalization

    College of Engineering, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA · Information System Department, UMBC, Baltimore, Maryland, USA · College of Graduate and Professional Studies, Trine University, Angola, Indiana, USA +1

  12. Physics-guided spatiotemporal neural models for fuel density prediction

    Jul 8, 2026Tolga Caglar, Jaynil Jaiswal, Saqib Azim +3Wildfire ForecastingPhysics-Informed ML

    San Diego Supercomputer Center University of California, San Diego

  13. Spatio-Temporal Wildfire Spread Prediction in Canada using a Video Swin-Hybrid-U-Net and Satellite Imagery

    Jun 15, 2026Maulik Srivastava, Esha Saha, Hao WangWildfire Forecasting

    Faculty of Science, University of Alberta · Interdisciplinary Lab for Mathematical Ecology & Epidemiology (ILMEE), University of Alberta · Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Alberta

  14. ShearFuse-UNet: Hadamard, DCT, and Shearlet Transform Fusion for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction

    Jun 12, 2026Ene Meco, Yingyi Luo, Emadeldeen Hamdan +2U-NetWildfire Forecasting

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607 USA · US Forest Service, Pacific Wildland Fire Science Laboratory, Seattle, WA 98103 USA

  15. Neural-Parameterized Cellular Automata for Wildfire Spread

    Jun 10, 2026Maksym Zhenirovskyy, Ion Matei, Rohit Vuppala +2Neural Cellular AutomataCellular Automata

    Fujitsu Research of America, 4655 Great America Pkwy, Santa Clara, 95124, CA, USA

  16. Does Your Wildfire Prediction Model Actually Work, or Just Score Well?

    May 14, 2026Yangshuang Xu, Yuyang Dai, Liling Chang +2Geospatial Foundation ModelsWildfire Forecasting

    Florida State University · Northeastern University

  17. PyroAdapt: Adapting Wildfire Prediction under Spatial Heterogeneity and Temporal Shift

    May 12, 2026Enyi Jiang, Wu SunLearning to RankDomain Adaptation

    Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illiois at Urbana-Champaign · Computer Science, Stanford University · Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science

  18. Set Prediction for Next-Day Active Fire Forecasting

    May 11, 2026Yuchen Bai, Georgios Athanasiou, Xin Yu +4Wildfire ForecastingSet Prediction

    Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany · Orion Lab, National Technical University of Athens · University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA +4

  19. Enabling Real-Time Training of a Wildfire-to-Smoke Map with Multilinear Operators

    May 5, 2026Zachary Morrow, Joseph Crockett, John D. Jakeman +1Surrogate ModelingWildfire Forecasting

    Sandia National Laboratories 1515 Eubank Blvd SE, Albuquerque, NM 87123

  20. Boundary-Aware Uncertainty Quantification for Wildfire Spread Prediction

    May 4, 2026Jonas V. FunkUncertainty QuantificationWildfire Forecasting

    Independent Research 76199 Karlsruhe, Germany

  21. FireSenseNet: A Dual-Branch CNN with Cross-Attentive Feature Interaction for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction

    Apr 9, 2026Jinzhen Han, JinByeong Lee, Hak Han +2Wildfire ForecastingConvolutional Neural Networks

    Department of Civil, Architectural & Environment Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea · AI Urban Disaster Prevention Research Center, Advanced Institute of Convergence Technology (AICT), Suwon 16229, Republic of Korea · Department of Fire Safety Engineering, Jeonju University, Republic of Korea

  22. Probabilistic Forecasting of Localized Wildfire Spread Based on Conditional Flow Matching

    Mar 27, 2026Bryan Shaddy, Haitong Qin, Brianna Binder +4Wildfire ForecastingProbabilistic Forecasting

    Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, University of Southern California · Department of Mathematics, University of Southern California · Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Colorado State University +1

  23. Operational evaluation of data-driven forest fire forecasting models

    Mar 26, 2026Shahbaz Alvi, Italo Epicoco, Jose Maria Costa SauraWildfire Forecasting

    CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Italy · Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento, Italy

  24. Conformal Risk Control for Safety-Critical Wildfire Evacuation Mapping: A Comparative Study of Tabular, Spatial, and Graph-Based Models

    Mar 20, 2026Baljinnyam DayanWildfire ForecastingConformal Risk Control

    Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.

  25. N-Tree Diffusion for Long-Horizon Wildfire Risk Forecasting

    Mar 7, 2026Yucheng Xing, Xin WangWildfire ForecastingDiffusion Models

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA

  26. OpFML: Pipeline for ML-based Operational Inference

    Jan 16, 2026Shahbaz Alvi, Giusy Fedele, Gabriele Accarino +3Wildfire ForecastingScientific ML

    CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Lecce, 73100, Italy · Columbia University, Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, New York, USA · University of Salento,Department of Innovation Engineering, Lecce, 73100, Italy

  27. CanadaFireSat: Toward high-resolution wildfire forecasting with multiple modalities

    Jun 10, 2025Hugo Porta, Emanuele Dalsasso, Jessica L. McCarty +1Wildfire ForecastingForecasting Benchmarks

    EPFL, Route des Ronquos 86, Sion, 1950, Wallis, Switzerland · Université Grenoble Alpes, Inria, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LJK, Grenoble, 38000, France · NASA Ames Research Center, Earth Science Division„ Moffett Field, California, 94035, USA