Uncertainty-aware deep learning for wildfire danger forecasting

Abstract

Wildfires are among the most severe natural hazards, posing a significant threat to both humans and natural ecosystems. The growing risk of wildfires increases the demand for forecasting models that are not only accurate but also reliable. deep learning (DL) has shown promise in predicting wildfire danger; however, its adoption is hindered by concerns over the reliability of its predictions, some of which stem from the lack of uncertainty quantification. To address this challenge, we present an uncertainty-aware DL framework that jointly captures epistemic (model) and aleatoric (data) uncertainty to enhance short-term wildfire danger forecasting. In the next-day forecasting, our best-performing model improves the area under the precision-recall curve by 1.1% and reduces the expected calibration error by 1.5% compared to a deterministic baseline, enhancing both predictive skill and calibration. Our experiments confirm the reliability of the uncertainty estimates and illustrate their practical utility for decision support, including the identification of uncertainty thresholds for rejecting low-confidence predictions and the generation of well-calibrated wildfire danger maps with accompanying uncertainty layers. Extending the forecast horizon up to ten days, we observe that aleatoric uncertainty increases with time, showing greater variability in environmental conditions, while epistemic uncertainty remains stable. Finally, we show that although the two uncertainty types may be redundant in low-uncertainty cases, they provide complementary insights under more challenging conditions, underscoring the value of their joint modeling for robust wildfire danger prediction. In summary, our approach significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of wildfire danger forecasting, advancing the development of trustworthy wildfire DL systems.