Google wants to find wildfires in space
“The time has been very compressed, especially since there was a fire, where technology needs to be applied to make decisions in time.
Krystal Azelton, senior director of Secure World Foundation, says it is a nonprofit advocate for sustainable space policy, but while satellites and AI technologies may provide better data, it is important that the data is on the right hand.
“The trend towards AI that supports all of this is clearly to produce better results, but not consistent results,” Azelton says. “This is really a huge positive, because one of my biggest concerns about all sorts of environmental surveillance from the space is how the person providing the data gets the data to the end users,” Azelton says. “There are a lot of high-tech solutions out there, but how do you get into the hands of people who are actually using them?
Van Arsdale says the Fire SAT team’s goal is to make tracking data as accessible as possible and they are committed to working directly with fire agencies.
“There’s this kind of war fog that’s related to fires and you don’t know where they’re going to be when they start,” Van Arsdale said of trying to propose this huge data collection idea to firefighters. “We’re going to give you a photo of everything you might care about.”
Speed Run
Although more information is usually better in disaster situations, it is not clear whether this type of satellite detection will be much faster than what is currently present. Camera networks that are deployed alertwildfire First discovered across the West Coast, including fatal ones Palisade Fire This January in Los Angeles. Also, while a fire-like camera might be able to pick up the fire the moment it starts, it doesn’t mean that just having that information will mobilize firefighters to reach the flames in time.
Daniel Swain, climate scientist who runs the blog Weather West He also has been tracking wildfires for a long time, but while satellite-enabled updates may not solve all the reality of response times, he says it will soon help to share information with dangerous people and provide information to people as the fire spreads.
“It doesn’t actually solve the underlying core problem, but it’s probably beneficial to do it,” Swain says. “It helps us know exactly where the fire is as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give us a big edge under the most extreme conditions.”
These fire efforts are also at the point of increasing investment in technology aimed at fighting wildfires. That is, the rise in private companies wanting to help build new fire solutions and benefit from the technology. President Trump in June I signed an executive order For a “common-sense” approach to combating wildfires, it had to prioritize the efforts of fire engineering companies, combine federal disaster agencies and instruct federal agencies to “declassify historic satellite data, improve wildfire predictions, and modify or eliminate rules that hinder wildfire detection, prevention and response.”