Spatial wildfire risk modeling using mixtures of tree-based multivariate Pareto distributions

Abstract

Wildfires pose a severe threat to the ecosystem and economy, and risk assessment is typically based on fire danger indices such as the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) used in Australia. Studying the joint tail dependence structure of high-resolution spatial FFDI data is thus crucial for estimating current and future extreme wildfire risk. However, existing likelihood-based inference approaches are computationally prohibitive in high dimensions due to the need to censor observations in the bulk of the distribution. To address this, we construct models for spatial FFDI extremes by leveraging the sparse conditional independence structure of H\"usler--Reiss-type generalized Pareto processes defined on trees. These models allow for a simplified likelihood function that is computationally efficient. Our framework involves a mixture of tree-based multivariate Pareto distributions with randomly generated tree structures, resulting in a flexible model that can capture nonstationary spatial dependence structures. We fit the model to summer FFDI data from different spatial clusters in Mainland Australia and 14 decadal windows between 1999--2022 to study local spatiotemporal variability with respect to the magnitude and extent of extreme wildfires. Our results demonstrate that our proposed method fits the margins and spatial tail dependence structure adequately, and is helpful to provide extreme wildfire risk measures.