Leveraging a Wildfire Risk Prediction Metric with Spatial Clustering

Abstract

Fire authorities have started widely using operational fire simulations for effective wildfire management. The aggregation of the simulation outputs on a massive scale creates an opportunity to apply the evolving data-driven approach to closely estimate wildfire risks even without running computationally expensive simulations. In one of our previous works, we validated the application with a probability-based risk metric that gives a series of probability values for a fire starting at a start location under a given weather condition. The probability values indicate how likely it is that a fire will fall into different risk categories. The metric considered each fire start location as a unique entity. Such a provision in the metric could expose the metric to scalability issues when the metric is used for a larger geographic area and consequently make the metric hugely intensive to compute. In this work, in an investigative effort, we investigate whether the spatial clustering of fire start locations based on historical fire areas can address the issue without significantly compromising the accuracy of the metric. Our results show that spatially clustering all fire start locations in Tasmania into three risk clusters could leverage the probability-based risk metric by reducing the computational requirements of the metric by a theoretical factor in thousands with a mere compromise of approximately 5% in accuracy for two risk categories of high and low, thereby validating the possibility of the leverage of the metric with spatial clustering.