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Abstract The increasing size and severity of wildfires across the western United States have generated dangerous levels of PM_2.5concentrations in recent years. In a changing climate, expanding the use of prescribed fires is widely considered to be the most robust fire mitigation strategy. However, reliably forecasting the potential air quality impact from prescribed fires, which is critical in planning the prescribed fires’ location and time, at hourly to daily time scales remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we introduce a spatio-temporal graph neural network (GNN)-based forecasting model for hourly PM_2.5predictions across California. Utilizing a two-step approach, we use our forecasting model to predict the net and ambient PM_2.5concentrations, which are used to estimate wildfire contributions. Integrating the GNN-based PM_2.5forecasting model with simulations of historically prescribed fires, we propose a novel framework to forecast their air quality impact. This framework determines that March is the optimal month for implementing prescribed fires in California and quantifies the potential air quality trade-offs involved in conducting more prescribed fires outside the peak of the fire season. 

Abstract. The annual area burned due to wildfires in the western United States (WUS) increased bymore than 300 % between 1984 and 2020. However, accounting for the nonlinear, spatially heterogeneous interactions between climate, vegetation, and human predictors driving the trends in fire frequency and sizes at different spatial scales remains a challenging problem for statistical fire models. Here we introduce a novel stochastic machine learning (SML) framework, SMLFire1.0, to model observed fire frequencies and sizes in 12 km × 12 km grid cells across the WUS. This framework is implemented using mixture density networks trained on a wide suite of input predictors. The modeled WUS fire frequency matches observations at both monthly (r=0.94) and annual (r=0.85) timescales, as do the monthly (r=0.90) and annual (r=0.88) area burned. Moreover, the modeled annual time series of both fire variables exhibit strong correlations (r≥0.6) with observations in 16 out of 18 ecoregions. Our ML model captures the interannual variability and the distinct multidecade increases in annual area burned for both forested and non-forested ecoregions. Evaluating predictor importance with Shapley additive explanations, we find that fire-month vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is the dominant driver of fire frequencies and sizes across the WUS, followed by 1000 h dead fuel moisture (FM1000), total monthly precipitation (Prec), mean daily maximum temperature (Tmax), and fraction of grassland cover in a grid cell. Our findings serve as a promising use case of ML techniques for wildfire prediction in particular and extreme event modeling more broadly. They also highlight the power of ML-driven parameterizations for potential implementation in fire modules of dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and earth system models (ESMs).