By the year 2100, the number of wildfires worldwide is expected to rise by 50%, according to a research published by the UN last year. According to that research, government investment should switch from reaction and response to preparation and prevention.
This is a tremendous challenge that goes beyond providing first responders with the appropriate equipment to put out these fires; it mostly revolves around figuring out how to foresee and avoid them. Federal, state, and local organisations cannot tackle this problem on their own, and a recent report could serve as the impetus for forming a public-private partnership to tackle the problem.
PCAST's (the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) recommendations for modernising firefighting were submitted in February. The majority of his advice concentrated on how firefighters can be better equipped with technology to protect the nation's 1.5 billion acres of fire-prone terrain.
The paper mainly emphasises artificial intelligence-based technologies as the key to developing safer and more effective defences against the wildfire epidemic. These technologies include simulators, weather prediction models, and autonomous systems.
The research also discusses how AI-based prediction and tracking can handle the wildfire activity that is overwhelming fire departments across the nation. PCAST argues that crucial technological and organisational parts of wildfire response are locked in the past century. The paper even calls this kind of real-time monitoring of wildfire progression the "Holy Grail of firefighter safety."
Drones Give Firefighters Eyes in the Sky
PCAST emphasises the necessity for developing autonomous wildland fire detection, evaluation, and containment technologies in its list of recommendations. Additionally, it exhorts federal agencies to collaborate with the private sector, which might hasten the impact of new technology.
The effectiveness of the nation's total wildfire response will grow thanks to drones and other autonomous technologies, which will also offer a fresh method of defending firefighters on the ground while they battle burning fires.
With the help of two new drone types, the U.S. Forest Service is already preparing to use this technology. One can use a drone to scan extensive forests for fires, while the other can then enter the area and start controlled burns to snuff out the larger fire's source of fuel.
The real world is made safer by virtual ones.
Other AI-driven technologies can assist through the virtual world while drones and other autonomous systems function in the real world. Digital twins will be crucial in all of this, simulating real-world surroundings and systems on a virtual platform.
The way federal, state, and local emergency responders deal with these more frequent fires will be significantly altered by modelling forecasts of wildfire behaviour in a simulated platform. Fire officials can examine the behaviour of real-world wildfires in real-time using simulation labs equipped with the platforms to enable digital twin environments. In a photorealistic setting, a digital twin can recommend the best course of action for putting out the fire.
Large, diverse data sets are required to build these ecosystems and guarantee the precision of these digital twin ideas. These data sets include information on topography, vegetation, and other factors in addition to real-time fire data gathered by sensors. Only planning and orchestration models that rely on AI and are powered by a graphics processing unit's processing capacity can achieve this degree of analysis.
Fire forecasting aids in allocating resources where needed
Federal agencies are already working on this cutting-edge technology. A sophisticated visualisation and virtual-world simulation platform is used by the USDA Forest Service Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory and the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control to analyse a fire's size and predict its course. In order to keep everyone as secure as possible, this aids federal, state, and local agencies in predicting where to focus resources on the ground.
In addition, researchers from the Montana Forest Service are using real data to recreate historical fires in order to train and develop new AI models. Engineers can use this information to evaluate the behaviour of past flames to both freshly developed models and the Rothermel surface fire spread model, the benchmark developed in the Missoula lab.
Lockheed Martin presents its Cognitive Mission Manager programme, which uses NVIDIA's Omniverse to combine real-world data from satellites, aircraft, and ground assets to construct digital twins of wildfire occurrences, at the GPU Technology Conference, taking place March 20–23.
The United States' land, citizens, and first responders are in danger due to the sharp increase in wildfires, yet we have the technology to fight these flames more safely and effectively. AI-driven systems will give us the edge we need to better fight these flames, foresee their pathways of damage, and even put them out before they start, especially those that are now being prototyped in the private sector.
sources:
https://statetechmagazine.com/article/2023/03/ai-driven-predictions-key-combatting-rise-wildfires
https://fireecology.springeropen.com/AIWFM#:~:text=AI%20linked%20with%20imaging%20satellites,to%20predict%20the%20occurrence%20and
https://interestingengineering.com/science/a-newly-developed-ai-based-method-can-accurately-predict-wildfires