Forest Wildfire Modelling and Prediction in Russia

Abstract

The wildfire (forest fire) is a natural disaster that causes great economical losses in many regions of Russia. In the present work the joint sample of daily values of the number of forest fire seats and the Nesterov meteorological index in Irkutsk region, seasons 1969–1988, are investigated. It appears that the evolution of forest fire is well described by a vector autoregression process based model. The prediction of the future numbers of fire seats can be performed using special computer algorithm, which is shown to produce accurate and reliable estimates up to 2 days ahead.