16. FireGen: Quantifying Wildfire Risk by Simulation

The extent and severity of new wildfires continue to devastate our planet, leaving lasting impacts on human health, property, water quality, essential services, biodiversity, and contributing to global climate change.

The goal of this project is to quantify how geophysical characteristics affect wildfire risk and variability. We assess the risk by creating a "wildfire generator" that simulates burned areas under changing climate conditions. We propose using spatial point process models to describe the distribution of burned area events in Northern California. This approach allows environmental factors, such as climate influences, to inform our model of potential fire occurrences. We then simulate burned areas as ellipses, using parameters derived from the fitted characteristics of observed wildfire shapes. Future work will involve developing risk metrics related to infrastructure exposure, such as calculating the total burned area and estimating the number of buildings impacted under various simulated wildfire scenarios.

wildfire generator 

Mid-Level

Knowledge

Women in Statistics and Data Science 2025