Reduced-order digital twin and latent data assimilation for global wildfire prediction

Abstract. The occurrence of forest fires can impact vegetation in the ecosystem, property, and human health but also indirectly affect the climate. The Joint UK Land Environment Simulator – INteractive Fire and Emissions algorithm for Natural envirOnments (JULES-INFERNO) is a global land surface model, which simulates vegetation, soils, and fire occurrence driven by environmental factors. However, this model incurs substantial computational costs due to the high data dimensionality and the complexity of differential equations. Deep-learning-based digital twins have an advantage in handling large amounts of data. They can reduce the computational cost of subsequent predictive models by extracting data features through reduced-order modelling (ROM) and then compressing the data to a low-dimensional latent space. This study proposes a JULES-INFERNO-based digital twin fire model using ROM techniques and deep learning prediction networks to improve the efficiency of global wildfire predictions. The iterative prediction implemented in the proposed model can use current-year data to predict fires in subsequent years. To avoid the accumulation of errors from the iterative prediction, latent data assimilation (LA) is applied to the prediction process. LA manages to efficiently adjust the prediction results to ensure the stability and sustainability of the prediction. Numerical results show that the proposed model can effectively encode the original data and achieve accurate surrogate predictions. Furthermore, the application of LA can also effectively adjust the bias of the prediction results. The proposed digital twin also runs 500 times faster for online predictions than the original JULES-INFERNO model without requiring high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.