Predictive Inference of a Wildfire Risk Pipeline in the United States
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Wildfires are rare catastrophic events that are influenced by global climate change and present ongoing threats to life and property. The August 2019 IPCC report on climate change notes that climate change is “expected to enhance the risk and severity of wildfires” in many areas. Hence there is an urgent need to accurately statistically model wildfire risks. Wildfire risk modeling requires accounting for several separate but related risk components which can be viewed as a “wildfire risk pipeline”. First, one must model where fires are most likely to start, based on weather, human activity, and related factors; then, based on a fire’s location, model the fire’s duration and size. Finally, a model can project risk exposure, the number of lives or properties exposed to the fire.
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