FireTwin

Reconstruct. Predict.
Understand wildfire.

Physics-grounded wildfire intelligence on a living digital twin.

TERRAIN LIVE
WEATHER ASSIMILATED
FUELS DYNAMIC
MODEL ENSEMBLE

01 — Terrain

Everything starts with the ground

A 5 m national elevation model, resampled and slope-resolved. Not a backdrop: the terrain is what turns a breeze into a run.

02 — Fuel

Fuel is measured, not assumed

Sentinel-2, PNOA LiDAR and the national forest map, classified into Scott & Burgan models for the state of the vegetation in August 2019 — not for today.

03 — Weather

Wind, resolved over the terrain

Reanalysis forcing downscaled by a mass-consistent solver to a 50 m grid, every 30 minutes — including the drainage breeze that turned the fire at night.

04 — Ignition

The hour nobody wrote down

The report records the detection. The ignition is unknown — so it is inferred, with an interval, and labelled as an inference wherever it appears.

05 — Physics

Hundreds of runs, not one

A Latin hypercube over ignition time, fuel moisture, wind bias and spread rate. The spread of the spaghetti is the honest answer.

06 — Observation

Every satellite pass corrects the state

Six overpasses fall inside the window. A detection proves the fire had arrived; its absence proves nothing — and the scoring is asymmetric because of it.

07 — Prediction

The ensemble collapses into bands

What survives the observations is a distribution, shown as ensemble percentiles under stated hypotheses. Never as a certified forecast.

One fire. Thousands of observations. One evolving state.

NOW

The current fire state: arrival time, active front, uncertainty.

+15 / +30

Short-horizon spread under the assimilated wind field.

+1 h

Ensemble bands, widening as the observations run out.

Capabilities

RECONSTRUCT

Rebuild a past fire from the record and the physics, with every layer carrying its provenance class.

OBSERVE

Fuse satellite detections, perimeters and station data into a single evolving state.

PREDICT

Run ensembles, not single deterministic lines, and report the intervals.

RESPOND

Turn the state into arrival estimates at the assets that matter.

Decision support for qualified wildfire professionals. FireTwin does not replace judgement, and every figure it shows carries its interval.

Not another fire map

GIS shows where the fire is.
FireTwin models what the fire is becoming.

FireState

The canonical state — arrival time, front, uncertainty. Static today, assimilating tomorrow.

Model Bus

One normalised contract, many engines. Swap the physics without rewriting the pipeline.

Evidence Graph

Every object knows where it came from, what it derives from and what contradicts it.

Physics meets AI

Physics-grounded AI

Physics

Rothermel surface spread over measured fuel, terrain and a downscaled wind field. Auditable, citable, wrong in ways you can name.

Learning

Statistics where the record supports it — never before three fully observed fires, and never with a fire split across train and test.

We say physics-grounded AI, not AI-powered. The difference is which one is load-bearing.

Case 001

La Granja de San Ildefonso · Segovia · Spain · 2019

Accident-investigation style: only canonical figures, each with its source and its class. Where a number is disputed, all the versions are kept.

ItemValueClass
Burned area (official register)385.77 haOFFICIAL
Copernicus EMSR375, 6 Aug370.2 haOFFICIAL
Own dNBR perimeter352.0 haDERIVED
Detection4 Aug, 14:46OFFICIAL
Ignition timeunder inferenceRECONSTRUCTED
Satellite detections96OBSERVED
Point of originas declared in the reportOFFICIAL

Five different burned-area figures coexist in the record and none is “the right one”; all are kept and labelled. FireTwin reconstructs when, where and how. Never who.

CASE 002

Selection criterion: observational richness — Copernicus EMS activations with multiple delineations.

CASE 003

Machine learning stays gated until three fully observed fires exist.

Who it is for

FIRE AGENCIES

Post-incident reconstruction, training scenarios, and a state that can be interrogated after the fact.

LAND & FORESTRY

Fuel state over time, treatment counterfactuals, exposure of stands and infrastructure.

UTILITIES & INFRASTRUCTURE

Arrival-time estimates at lines, substations and access roads, with intervals attached.

INSURANCE & CLIMATE RISK

Physically grounded event reconstruction for loss attribution and scenario work.

FIRETWIN