Climate change is making wildfires more unpredictable. Will analytics, drones and satellites help fight them? 📝 julie_cart
. That blanket of cool, moist air that kept major fires out of coastal areas can no longer be relied upon to safeguard California’s redwood forests. Nighttime fires
“We're losing fog. We're seeing drier conditions longer and later into the season. And so what that means for California right now is, under these record heat waves, we're also now butting up against the Santa Ana wind conditions,” she said. “I think we're loading the dice in a certain direction.”Among the many specialists at work are fire behavior analysts, who are responsible for predicting a fire’s daily movements for the incident commander.
I might look at computer models, fire spread models, and the weather forecast. There’s other data that tells you what fuels are in the area. You plug all that in to see where the fire will be 24 hours from now.” In California, the National Guard is entering the fourth year of an agreement to share non-classified information pulled from military satellites that scan for heat signatures from the boost phase of ballistic missiles. When those heat images are associated with wildfires, the agency’sMeteorologist Craig Clements, director of the Fire Weather Research Laboratory at San Jose State University, has chased fires for a decade.
Fireline experience and hard-earned knowledge still counts when formulating tactics. But it’s a measure of how norms have shifted that even that institutional knowledge can fail. Perhaps the biggest leap is applying artificial intelligence to understand fire behavior. Neil Sahota, an AI advisor to the United Nations and a lecturer at UC Irvine, is developing systems to train a computer to review reams of data and come to a predictive conclusion.
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