Wildfire Spread Prediction Using Attention Mechanisms in U-NET

Global warming has increased large-scale natural disasters at an alarmingly greater frequency. These natural disasters affect humans and the ecosystems that all species rely upon for food and shelter. A significant byproduct of global warming is the emergence of mega-fires, which are wildfires that burn more than 100,000 acres. Mega fires have exhibited the capacity to destroy entire ecosystems and urban areas. Researchers forecast a significant increase in wildfires during the next decade. This is a fundamentally growing problem that mandates modern solutions. Currently, simulation models are employed to predict wildfire propagation and aid firefighters in suppressing them. However, these methods are computationally expensive and often inaccurate. A recent advance in this area is the usage of neural networks (NN), which are systematically more accurate and computationally efficient. This paper focuses on predicting wildfire spread using NN with an attention mechanism to improve spatial recognition and overall performance in neural networks for wildfire spread prediction. We train different models on 12 distinct observational variables derived from the Google Earth Engine catalog. Evaluation is conducted with accuracy, Dice coefficient score, ROC-AUC, and F1-score. Results show that when augmenting segmentation models with attention mechanisms, the attention component improves feature suppression and recognition, improving overall performance. Furthermore, we use ensemble modeling to reduce bias and variation, leading to more consistent and accurate predictions. The architecture presented in this research achieved a ROC-AUC score of 86.2% and an accuracy of 82.1% when inferencing on wildfire propagation at 30-minute intervals.