It’s the first week of September, the unofficial start to fall, and the heart of the wildfire season. Temperatures are starting to dip, and fires are raging in the dried-out tinder-boxes of California, Montana, and Colorado. While aerial firefighting is now used ubiquitously across the U.S., the Glenwood Springs region in Colorado is currently ground-zero for using new technology fueled by artificial intelligence to fight fires from the air.
The Center of Excellence for Advanced Technology Aerial Firefighting (CEATAF) is deploying AI technology known as the Team Awareness Kit (TAK) to stay on top of Colorado’s Grizzly Creek Fire. It is the first time TAK has been used in the field according to CEATAF. “We are able to see exactly where the fire is burning, see where the firefighters are, and get intelligence in real-time on the behavior and activity of the fire,” Brad Schmidt, the wildlife center project manager for CEATAF told Denver’s ABC television affiliate. “By seeing the locations of your fellow crew members in real-time you are able to coordinate more effectively with them.”
TAK was originally developed by the Department of Defense for combat operations and is now being implemented into law enforcement and emergency teams. It can track the location of firefighting crew team members, equipment, and the spread of the fire in real-time. A helicopter or plane adds infrared video taken from above. Consolidating that data enables predictions to be made about how the fire will spread. It also facilitates increased safety for firefighting personnel. “If someone gets into a bad situation, we know we have a better chance of being able to help guide them back to safety,” Schmidt said.
CEATAF states on its website that its mission is to ‘drive technological advancement to improve firefighting practices and influence innovation across the public safety community.’ It is particularly focused on providing map-based situational awareness in backcountry areas that don’t have internet connectivity. This is no easy feat. “There is an enormous amount of math and science that goes into being able to put video onto the surface of the earth,” Schmidt told ABC. “Our state multi-mission aircraft is able to fly this area during the middle of the day and collect a new perimeter showing the size of the fire. And we are able to map that out.” There are positive signs that the technology has been effective. It was announced today that the Grizzly Creek fire is 75% contained. Fire officials say the blaze is ‘human-caused’ and has burned more than 30,000 acres about one-hour from Aspen.
AI is also used in the fight against wildfires in Southern California. An AI system called WIFIRE is used by the Los Angeles Fire Department, as well as County Fire Departments in Ventura, Orange County, and San Diego. WIFIRE was designed to predict a wildfire’s path in real-time. The AI software consolidates satellite images to determine the combustibility of vegetation, with real-time weather data. WIFIRE creates predictions on the movement of the flames. It was created by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the UC San Diego, under a $2.6-million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has an annual budget of $200,000 to operate, according to Time reporting.
NASA, JPL, and the Department of Homeland Security have also developed an AI software application to provide situational awareness to firefighters. The Assistant for Understanding Data through Reasoning, Extraction and sYnthesis, (AUDREY) system collects temperature readings, thermal imagery, heat flux, and 360-degree video. It was put to the test in a syndicated fire in the Sacramento area in 2018. Rick Clarke, the Battalion Chief of the Cosumnes Fire Department was impressed with the data it was able to accumulate .“AUDREY was designed by NASA to help their launch program and to hear multiple conversations at a time,” Clarke said. “The human ear and the brain don’t necessarily have the ability to comprehend those fine pieces of communication that are happening when lots of stuff is going on. AUDREY is not affected by those influences. She has the ability to reduce noise, separate conversations, key terms like Mayday, emergency…and able to send that directly to the incident commander and dispatcher.”