The size and frequency of wildland fires in the western United States have dramatically increased in recent years. On high-fire-risk days, a small fire ignition can rapidly grow and become out of control. Early detection of fire ignitions from initial smoke can assist the response to such fires before they become difficult to manage. Past deep learning approaches for wildfire smoke detection have suffered from small or unreliable datasets that make it difficult to extrapolate performance to real-world scenarios. In this work, we present the Fire Ignition Library (FIgLib), a publicly available dataset of nearly 25,000 labeled wildfire smoke images as seen from fixed-view cameras deployed in Southern California. We also introduce SmokeyNet, a novel deep learning architecture using spatiotemporal information from camera imagery for real-time wildfire smoke detection. When trained on the FIgLib dataset, SmokeyNet outperforms comparable baselines and rivals human performance. We hope that the availability of the FIgLib dataset and the SmokeyNet architecture will inspire further research into deep learning methods for wildfire smoke detection, leading to automated notification systems that reduce the time to wildfire response.

Research has shown that climate change creates warmer temperatures and drier conditions, leading to longer wildfire seasons and increased wildfire risks in the United States. These factors have, in turn, led to increases in the frequency, extent, and severity of wildfires in recent years. Given the danger posed by wildland fires to people, property, wildlife, and the environment, there is an urgent need to provide tools for effective wildfire management. Early detection of wildfires is essential to minimizing potentially catastrophic destruction. To that end, in this paper, we present our work on integrating multiple data sources into SmokeyNet, a deep learning model using spatiotemporal information to detect smoke from wildland fires. We present Multimodal SmokeyNet and SmokeyNet Ensemble for multimodal wildland fire smoke detection using satellite-based fire detections, weather sensor measurements, and optical camera images. An analysis is provided to compare these multimodal approaches to the baseline SmokeyNet in terms of accuracy metrics, as well as time-to-detect, which is important for the early detection of wildfires. Our results show that incorporating weather data in SmokeyNet improves performance numerically in terms of both F1 and time-to-detect over the baseline with a single data source. With a time-to-detect of only a few minutes, SmokeyNet can be used for automated early notification of wildfires, providing a useful tool in the fight against destructive wildfires.

Influenced by the advances in data and computing, the scientific practice increasingly involves machine learning and artificial intelligence driven methods which requires specialized capabilities at the system-, science- and service-level in addition to the conventional large-capacity supercomputing approaches. The latest distributed architectures built around the composability of data-centric applications led to the emergence of a new ecosystem for container coordination and integration. However, there is still a divide between the application development pipelines of existing supercomputing environments, and these new dynamic environments that disaggregate fluid resource pools through accessible, portable and re-programmable interfaces. New approaches for dynamic composability of heterogeneous systems are needed to further advance the data-driven scientific practice for the purpose of more efficient computing and usable tools for specific scientific domains. In this paper, we present a novel approach for using composable systems in the intersection between scientific computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and remote sensing domain. We describe the architecture of a first working example of a composable infrastructure that federates Expanse, an NSF-funded supercomputer, with Nautilus, a Kubernetes-based GPU geo-distributed cluster. We also summarize a case study in wildfire modeling, that demonstrates the application of this new infrastructure in scientific workflows: a composed system that bridges the insights from edge sensing, AI and computing capabilities with a physics-driven simulation.

The size and frequency of wildland fires in the western United States have dramatically increased in recent years. On high-fire-risk days, a small fire ignition can rapidly grow and become out of control. Early detection of fire ignitions from initial smoke can assist the response to such fires before they become difficult to manage. Past deep learning approaches for wildfire smoke detection have suffered from small or unreliable datasets that make it difficult to extrapolate performance to real-world scenarios. In this work, we present the Fire Ignition Library (FIgLib), a publicly available dataset of nearly 25,000 labeled wildfire smoke images as seen from fixed-view cameras deployed in Southern California. We also introduce SmokeyNet, a novel deep learning architecture using spatiotemporal information from camera imagery for real-time wildfire smoke detection. When trained on the FIgLib dataset, SmokeyNet outperforms comparable baselines and rivals human performance. We hope that the availability of the FIgLib dataset and the SmokeyNet architecture will inspire further research into deep learning methods for wildfire smoke detection, leading to automated notification systems that reduce the time to wildfire response.

Reliable performance metrics are necessary prerequisites to building large-scale end-to-end integrated workflows for collaborative scientific research, particularly within context of use-inspired decision making platforms with many concurrent users and when computing real-time and urgent results using large data. This work is a building block for the National Data Platform, which leverages multiple use-cases including the WIFIRE Data and Model Commons for wildfire behavior modeling and the EarthScope Consortium for collaborative geophysical research. This paper presents an artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) approach to performance assessment and optimization of scientific workflows. An associated early AI/ML framework spanning performance data collection, prediction and optimization is applied to wildfire science applications within the WIFIRE BurnPro3D (BP3D) platform for proactive fire management and mitigation.