Machine learning predicts how big wildfires will get - Futurity

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. A new technique can predict the final size of wildfires from the moment of ignition, researchers report. Built around a machine learning algorithm, the model can help forecast whether a wildfire will be small, medium, or large by the time it has run its course--knowledge useful to those in charge of allocating scarce firefighting resources. "A useful analogy is to consider what makes something go viral in social media," says lead author Shane Coffield, a doctoral student in earth system science at the University of California, Irvine. "We can think about what properties of a specific tweet or post might make it blow up and become really popular--and how you might predict that at the moment it's posted or right before it's posted." The researchers applied that thinking to a hypothetical situation in which dozens of fires break out simultaneously.