Escalating global climate change has intensified the frequency and scale of wildfires in mountainous regions hosting transmission line infrastructure. These conflagrations act as extreme meteorological events, capable of generating localized heatwaves that compromise the air insulation of power lines and trigger protective relay operations, thereby posing systemic threats to regional grid stability. To enhance wildfire early-warning efficacy for grid security, this study formulates wildfire early warning for power transmission corridors as a regression-based risk prediction problem and proposes a hierarchical “global screening–local refinement” risk assessment framework. The primary contribution of this study lies in the integration of a machine-learning-based global wildfire risk screening model with tower-level spatial refinement using geographically weighted regression (GWR), enabling coordinated global–local wildfire risk characterization along power transmission corridors The framework employs a predictive model built on a Gradient Boosting Decision Tree algorithm, integrating geospatial and statistical analyses. A global risk model, utilizing historical data from the Himawari-8 satellite alongside meteorological, topographic, and anthropogenic variables, produces a composite risk index. This index is spatially interpolated via Kriging to generate stratified wildfire risk maps for broad-area assessment. For precise corridor-level analysis, these Globally Projected Risk Indices, along with localized terrain features, inter-tower clearance distances, and proximity to historical ignition points, are incorporated into a Geographically Weighted Regression model. This yields a spatially calibrated wildfire risk index along critical routes. The results show that the GBDT-based model achieved the best predictive performance among the evaluated regression models, with an R2 of 0.626 and a mean squared error of 0.178. This approach offers a scientifically robust and operationally viable reference for wildfire prevention strategies in power line maintenance.
Xue et al. (Wed,) studied this question.