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Why can't we prevent wildfires / bushfires?
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4 points
by Viralsneezer
2110 days ago
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Why can't we prevent wildfires / bushfires? The annually recurring wildfires near west coast of USA and Canada, and the bushfires near the east coast of Auatralia.
Why can't this be implemented immediately:
Satellites keep constant watch on fire-prone areas. Detect a wildfire / bushfire almost as soon as the first sparks occur.
Automatically generate alerts ... and trigger launch of firefighting aircraft (choppers, drones) to douse a fire within a few minutes of detection.
Use AI predict rate of expansion of fire (wind speed and direction data, realtime satellite thermographic analysis to give size, expected rate and direction of fire growth).
The satellites that can do this have been in place for years.
USA, Canada, and Australia have the resources to implement this before the next fire season. |
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* We don't currently have the satellites to monitor fires at both small scale and real time. Geostationary (real time) satellites have a resolution of ~1km, and higher resolution satellites of ~10m to ~1m may only make a pass once per day.
* The FAA imposes flight restrictions around wildfires and doesn't make exceptions for research or scrappy startups, so it's tough to experiment or go to market with drone-based monitoring or firefighting.
* A lot of research has been done into fire spread prediction, including some using AI, but it's a difficult problem. Like weather forecasting it's pretty accurate on short time horizons, but over many hours and days errors compound.
* Data. High resolution fuel data is needed, which changes every season as vegetation changes, and changes every day with the weather. Quality elevation data is needed. We don't have much ground-truth data of what's going on inside a wildfire.
Finally, we have a combination of: forest fires are natural, suppressing them increases future likelihood of fire, people are building houses in fire-prone areas, climate change is increasing the frequency of fires.
We could probably do more to reduce the loss of life due to fire, but the biggest problems are social rather than technical: we need to reduce our impact on the climate, stop building houses in high-risk areas, and not get NIMBY about prescribed burns and forest management.