- Devastating wind-fuelled wildfires caused havoc in southern California earlier this year.
- With the climate crisis increasing the chances of deadly blazes, firefighters are looking for ways to even the odds.
- One solution being explored is an AI-powered satellite constellation.
California is turning to a novel solution to battle massive wildfires fuelled by global warming: AI-powered satellites.
Deadly wildfires devastated the Los Angeles region earlier this year, forcing over 100,000 people to evacuate and razing thousands of homes.
Driven by freak environmental conditions, including prolonged drought and strong winds, the LA fires quickly grew to the point they were nigh-on impossible to contain, pushing firefighters and fire-monitoring systems to their absolute limit.
As the city rebuilds, California’s fire-fighting division is looking to change that.
The state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire, is partnering with a group of organizations building the Firesat network, a constellation of over 50 low-orbit satellites that aims to revolutionize the way we tackle mega-blazes.
The fast-growing, wind-driven fires that devastated Los Angeles are only going to become more common as the climate crisis continues, with similar infernos breaking out in Colorado and Greece in recent years.
In these fires, every second counts. Brian Collins, executive director of the Earth Fire Alliance, the nonprofit organization behind Firesat, told Business Insider that current fire monitoring systems are often too slow to give firefighters a clear picture of these rapidly unfolding conflagrations.
“In extreme circumstances, like we see in California with wind-driven fires, you have very little time to make those critical decisions. The faster you can make them, the easier it is to contain that fire,” Collins said.
He said Firesat would significantly improve the ability to track wildfires compared to the current system, which is mostly made up of weather satellites, some of which are run by the US and European Union.
Collins said these satellites are designed to track large, intense fires and scan the globe relatively infrequently.
By contrast, the infrared sensors on Firesat’s satellites will be able to track smaller low-intensity fires the size of a classroom and — once the 50-satellite network is up and running — will be able to observe the entire globe in 15-20-minute intervals.
“In terms of fire detection, that is a dramatic, hundred-fold difference from current systems,” said Collins.
Fighting fires smarter
Space startup Muon Space is designing and building the satellites.
On March 14, it successfully launched a pathfinder prototype satellite aboard a SpaceX rocket. The prototype launch lays the ground for the planned launch of the first three Firesat satellites into orbit in June 2026.
Muon Space president Gregory Smirin told BI in an interview before the launch that this initial first phase will be able to scan every point in the globe twice a day, and be able to identify fires as small as five by five meters.
“We have sparse data, to be polite about it, as to how many fires there are all over the world and what the incident rate is. The goal is to be able to get to a point where we can get a much richer dataset about what the actual behavior is,” said Smirin.
“If you’re able to track hot spots and fires early, you can even identify where there are maybe fires that might be smoldering or low intensity ahead of high wind events,” he said, adding that this would allow firefighters to send resources to these smaller blazes before they become too large to contain.
Firesat also has backing from Google Research, and last week’s launch was praised by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Collins said Google’s AI and machine learning expertise would play a crucial role in sifting through the vast quantities of data the constellation is expected to generate.
He added that with the funding the Earth Fire Alliance has received from partners such as Google’s philanthropy arm and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the group was committed to providing the data from Firesat to public safety agencies for free.
Collins said the Alliance was already partnering with fire responders such as Cal Fire to understand how they might use the data.
A spokesperson for Cal Fire confirmed the agency’s interest in Firesat to Business Insider.
They added that the agency’s primary interest in the satellite network was in providing more persistent coverage of fires that are actively growing or being contained.
Smirin said he believed Cal Fire was interested in integrating Firesat into its emergency dispatch service, allowing the agency to validate which fires were growing quickly rather than wasting resources by dispatching crews to check on them.
“We’re definitely getting more extreme weather and more frequent fire, and we’re getting fire spreading in areas that it didn’t use to,” said Smirin.
“I think you’re just seeing more extreme weather in all sorts of ways, and it’s putting a lot more pressure on firefighters to figure out how to respond, he added.
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