WildfireSpreadTS: A dataset of multi-modal time series for wildfire spread prediction

We present a multi-temporal, multi-modal remote-sensing dataset for predicting how active wildfires will spread at a resolution of 24 hours. The dataset consists of 13607 images across 607 fire events in the United States from January 2018 to October 2021. For each fire event, the dataset contains a full time series of daily observations, containing detected active fires and variables related to fuel, topography and weather conditions. The dataset is challenging due to: a) its inputs being multi-temporal, b) the high number of 23 multi-modal input channels, c) highly imbalanced labels and d) noisy labels, due to smoke, clouds, and inaccuracies in the active fire detection. The underlying complexity of the physical processes adds to these challenges. Compared to existing public datasets in this area, WildfireSpreadTS allows for multi-temporal modeling of spreading wildfires, due to its time series structure. Furthermore, we provide additional input modalities and a high spatial resolution of 375m for the active fire maps. We publish this dataset to encourage further research on this important task with multi-temporal, noise-resistant or generative methods, uncertainty estimation or advanced optimization techniques that deal with the high-dimensional input space.