FireSRnet: Geoscience-Driven Super-Resolution of Future Fire Risk from Climate Change

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning super-resolution model that enhances fire risk maps from climate models, integrating satellite data and local land information to improve local fire risk assessments for future climate scenarios.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel deep learning approach for super-resolution of fire risk maps, outperforming standard methods and demonstrating applicability to climate change projections.

Findings

Outperforms standard interpolation at 4x and 8x resolutions

Maintains comparable performance at 2x resolution

Successfully generalizes to different geographic regions

Abstract

With fires becoming increasingly frequent and severe across the globe in recent years, understanding climate change's role in fire behavior is critical for quantifying current and future fire risk. However, global climate models typically simulate fire behavior at spatial scales too coarse for local risk assessments. Therefore, we propose a novel approach towards super-resolution (SR) enhancement of fire risk exposure maps that incorporates not only 2000 to 2020 monthly satellite observations of active fires but also local information on land cover and temperature. Inspired by SR architectures, we propose an efficient deep learning model trained for SR on fire risk exposure maps. We evaluate this model on resolution enhancement and find it outperforms standard image interpolation techniques at both 4x and 8x enhancement while having comparable performance at 2x enhancement. We then demonstrate the generalizability of this SR model over northern California and New South Wales, Australia. We conclude with a discussion and application of our proposed model to climate model simulations of fire risk in 2040 and 2100, illustrating the potential for SR enhancement of fire risk maps from the latest state-of-the-art climate models.