Monte Carlo-based ensemble method for prediction of grassland fire spread

Abstract

The operational prediction of fire spread to support fire management operations relies on a deterministic approach where a single ‘best-guess’ forecast is produced from the best estimate of the environmental conditions driving the fire. Although fire can be considered a phenomenon of low predictability and the estimation of input conditions for fire behaviour models is fraught with uncertainty, no error component is associated with these forecasts. At best, users will derive an uncertainty bound to the model outputs based on their own personal experience. A simple ensemble method that considers the uncertainty in the estimation of model input values and Monte Carlo sampling was applied with a grassland fire-spread model to produce a probability density function of rate of spread. This probability density function was then used to describe the uncertainty in the fire behaviour prediction and to produce probability-based outputs. The method was applied to a grassland wildfire case study dataset. The ensemble method did not improve the general statistics describing model fit but provided complementary information describing the uncertainty associated with the predictions and a probabilistic output for the occurrence of threshold levels of fire behaviour.