2023/06/19 by Ioannis Prapas, Prapas, Ioannis, Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos +9 · 3 citations
Environmental Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Ecosystem dynamics and resilience #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Remote Sensing in Agriculture #Species Distribution and Climate Change
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2306.10940
openalex publication_date 2023/06/19 · openalex created_date 2023/06/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Wildfires are increasingly exacerbated as a result of climate change, necessitating advanced proactive measures for effective mitigation. It is important to forecast wildfires weeks and months in advance to plan forest fuel management, resource procurement and allocation. To achieve such accurate long-term forecasts at a global scale, it is crucial to employ models that account for the Earth system's inherent spatio-temporal interactions, such as memory effects and teleconnections. We propose a teleconnection-driven vision transformer (TeleViT), capable of treating the Earth as one interconnected system, integrating fine-grained local-scale inputs with global-scale inputs, such as climate indices and coarse-grained global variables. Through comprehensive experimentation, we demonstrate the superiority of TeleViT in accurately predicting global burned area patterns for various forecasting windows, up to four months in advance. The gain is especially pronounced in larger forecasting windows, demonstrating the improved ability of deep learning models that exploit teleconnections to capture Earth system dynamics. Code available at https://github.com/Orion-Ai-Lab/TeleViT.