Next Day Wildfire Spread: A Machine Learning Data Set to Predict Wildfire Spreading from Remote-Sensing Data

Understand

Predicting wildfire spread is critical for land management and disaster preparedness.

• To this end, we present `Next Day Wildfire Spread,' a curated, large-scale, multivariate data set of historical wildfires aggregating nearly a decade of remote-sensing data across the United States.
• In contrast to existing fire data sets based on Earth observation satellites, our data set combines 2D fire data with multiple explanatory variables (e.g., topography, vegetation, weather, drought index, population density) aligned over 2D regions, providing a feature-rich data set for machine learning.
• To demonstrate the usefulness of this data set, we implement a neural network that takes advantage of the spatial information of this data to predict wildfire spread.