The simulator is powered by PyroWISE — a pure-Python, GIS-native, AI-augmented wildland fire-growth engine, built as a clean-room reimplementation of the public, peer-reviewed Canadian CFFDRS / WISE science stack, with every equation kept explicit and citable.
PyroWISE is not a one-off research model: it is the engine that runs in production behind the Karst Firewall operator dashboard. It pushes a fire front across the real cross-border landscape — fuel, weather, terrain and infrastructure — and, by running many slightly varied simulations, reports the outcome as probabilities (ensemble envelopes and a burn-probability surface) rather than a single predicted line. Every run is reproducible and fully traceable, backed by a scientific kernel under more than 4,000 automated tests.
A short-horizon run from live cross-border weather and a single ignition point — where the fire would reach in the coming hours, streamed perimeter by perimeter as it solves.
Operator-chosen conditions for prevention, training and impact studies — test ignition points, weather and firebreaks, run as a probabilistic ensemble.
Re-run a recorded fire on the weather it actually burned in — the basis for benchmarking, calibration and after-action review.
The physics kernel preserves the established CFFDRS science unchanged — three peer-reviewed systems work together to turn weather, fuel and terrain into a moving fire front.
Translates temperature, humidity, wind and rain into fuel-moisture codes (FFMC, DMC, DC) and fire-behaviour indices (ISI, BUI, FWI).
Computes rate of spread, intensity and fuel consumption across the 16 canonical fuel types, extended here with a 9-class Karst envelope.
Advances a polygon fire perimeter through a heterogeneous fuel × wind × slope × barrier field, with self-intersection cleanup and spotting merges.
The standard Canadian fuel models are adapted to the Dinaric Karst (the limestone belt running south-east from north-east Italy and Slovenia through Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania — the cross-border Karst is its north-western tip) and NE-Italy vegetation through a 9-class Karst envelope (K01–K09) and a five-grid resolver that fuses species, structure, age, moisture and continuity into the active fuel model per pixel.
Beyond the static fuel map, PyroWISE is building a dynamic picture of how flammable the landscape is — refreshed from satellites every few hours instead of frozen in a year-old map. The backbone is a familiar number, NDVI (the Sentinel-2 vegetation "greenness" index); the novelty is what the system does with it — comparing today's greenness against what is normal for the season, turning that gap into a vegetation-stress signal, and wiring it straight into the fire-spread physics.
In one line: PyroWISE is turning Sentinel-2 greenness into a live measure of how dry the landscape really is right now — and connecting that, for the first time, straight into how fast it predicts a fire will run. The architecture splits cleanly: PyroWISE owns the science (baselines, anomalies, fuel coupling); the operational web app mirrors and renders it.
The KFWI service answers where a fire is likely to start and how alarmed to be; PyroWISE answers given an ignition, where the fire goes and by when. They are independent services.
AUC of the Random Forest ignition model (hotspot density, infrastructure proximity, vegetation, seasonal + diurnal cycle, proper pseudo-absence sampling).
fire detection on the 1,227-fire validation cohort for the integrated risk = P(ignition) × severity_weight(FWI) — versus ~29% for FWI alone.
of Karst fires occur below the generic European EFFIS "High" threshold, so EU defaults under-rate the regional risk — hence the Karst-calibrated thresholds.
PyroWISE is a clean-room reimplementation of public science — it benchmarks at the file boundary against WISE / Prometheus (Canadian Forest Service), Cell2Fire and the FARSITE / FlamMap family, computing IoU, Hausdorff and area-error against recorded fire perimeters.
Data & reference feeds
PyroWISE is released under AGPL-3.0, matching the upstream WISE licence. The smoke-dispersion product (NOAA HYSPLIT Gaussian-puff) is currently uncalibrated and shown for context only.