High-Resolution Live Fuel Moisture Content (LFMC) Maps for Wildfire Risk from Multimodal Earth Observation Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel AI-driven method to generate high-resolution, wall-to-wall LFMC maps for wildfire risk assessment using multimodal earth observation data, significantly improving accuracy and enabling rapid nationwide updates.

Contribution

It introduces a pretrained multimodal earth observation model for large-scale LFMC mapping, outperforming previous models and providing an automated pipeline for real-time wildfire risk monitoring.

Findings

20% reduction in RMSE over previous methods

Effective in wildfire-affected regions Eaton and Palisades

Automated pipeline enables rapid nationwide LFMC mapping

Abstract

Wildfires are increasing in intensity and severity at an alarming rate. Recent advances in AI and publicly available satellite data enable monitoring critical wildfire risk factors globally, at high resolution and low latency. Live Fuel Moisture Content (LFMC) is a critical wildfire risk factor and is valuable for both wildfire research and operational response. However, ground-based LFMC samples are both labor intensive and costly to acquire, resulting in sparse and infrequent updates. In this work, we explore the use of a pretrained, highly-multimodal earth-observation model for generating large-scale spatially complete (wall-to-wall) LFMC maps. Our approach achieves significant improvements over previous methods using randomly initialized models (20 reduction in RMSE). We provide an automated pipeline that enables rapid generation of these LFMC maps across the United States, and demonstrate its effectiveness in two regions recently impacted by wildfire (Eaton and Palisades).