A Deep Learning Framework: Predicting Fire Radiative Power From the Combination of Polar-Orbiting and Geostationary Satellite Data During Wildfire Spread

• Published in: IEEE journal of selected topics in applied earth observations and remote sensing Vol. 17; pp. 10827 - 10841
• Main Authors: Dong, Zixun, Zheng, Change, Zhao, Fengjun, Wang, Guangyu, Tian, Ye, Li, Hongchen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Biological system modeling; Deep learning; Environmental assessment; Fire control; Fire fighting; fire radiative power (FRP); Forestry; Performance indices; Performance prediction; Polar orbits; Population density; Predictions; Predictive models; Real time; Remote sensing; Satellites; spatiotemporal prediction; Synchronous satellites; Transfer learning; Vegetation index; Vegetation mapping; wildfire; Wildfires
• ISSN: 1939-1404; 2151-1535
• DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2024.3403146

Fire radiative power (FRP) is a key indicator for evaluating the intensity of wildfires, unlike traditional real-time fire lines or combustion areas that only provide binary information, and its accurate prediction is more important for firefighting actions and environmental pollution assessment. To this end, we used a combination of data from geostationary satellites and polar orbit satellites to correct the FRP data. Incorporating various factors that affect wildfire spread, such as meteorological conditions, topography, vegetation indexes, and population density, we constructed a comprehensive California wildfire spread dataset, covering information since 2017. Then, we established a deep learning framework that integrates various modules to analyze multimodal data for the accurate prediction of FRP imagery. We investigated the impact of input sequence length and loss function design on model predictive performance, leading to subsequent model optimization. Furthermore, our model has demonstrated acceptable performance in transfer learning and multistep prediction, emphasizing its application value in wildfire prediction and management. It can provide more detailed information about wildfire spread, showcasing the powerful capability of deep learning to process multimodal data and its potential in the emerging field of real-time FRP prediction.