[PCA] Predicting wildfires across the contiguous US

De Angelis, Patricia patricia_deangelis at fws.gov
Thu May 16 11:34:33 CDT 2019


These researchers developed a model that allows for regional variation in
weather effects and housing densities and has good predictive accuracy for
fire extremes at a regional scale that "can support regional wildfire
management and probabilistic hazard assessment." Rather technical, but
interesting.

Accepted article:*
SPATIOTEMPORAL PREDICTION OF WILDFIRE SIZE EXTREMES WITH BAYESIAN FINITE
SAMPLE MAXIMA
By
Maxwell B. Joseph  Matthew W. Rossi  Nathan P. Mietkiewicz  Adam L. Mahood
Megan E. Cattau  Lise Ann St.Denis  R. Chelsea Nagy  Virginia Iglesias
John T. Abatzoglou  Jennifer K. Ba
13 April 2019
in
Ecological Applications
ABSTRACT: Wildfires are becoming more frequent in parts of the globe, but
predicting where and when wildfires occur remains difficult. To predict
wildfire extremes across the contiguous United States, we integrate a 30
year wildfire record with meteorological and housing data in spatiotemporal
Bayesian statistical models with spatially varying nonlinear effects. We
compared different distributions for the number and sizes of large fires to
generate a posterior predictive distribution based on finite sample maxima
for extreme events (the largest fires over bounded spatiotemporal domains).
A zero‐inflated negative binomial model for fire counts and a lognormal
model for burned areas provided the best performance. This model attains
99% interval coverage for the number of fires and 93% coverage for fire
sizes over a six year withheld data set. Dryness and air temperature
strongly predict extreme wildfire probabilities. Housing density has a
hump‐shaped relationship with fire occurrence, with more fires occurring at
intermediate housing densities. Statistically, these drivers affect the
chance of an extreme wildfire in two ways: by altering fire size
distributions, and by altering fire frequency, which influences sampling
from the tails of fire size distributions. We conclude that recent extremes
should not be surprising, and that the contiguous United States may be on
the verge of even larger wildfire extremes.


*This article is protected by copyright. Accepted, unedited articles
published online and citable.

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eap.1898
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plantconservation.org/pipermail/native-plants_lists.plantconservation.org/attachments/20190516/1cc57e7a/attachment.html>


More information about the native-plants mailing list