2024 saw the unparalleled success of an artificial intelligence detection system in California that alerts authorities to the breakout of small wildfires in the state’s dry forests.
A partnership between the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) and the Univ. of California San Diego called AlertCalifornia has already detected 77 wildfires before a 911 call was made for any of them.
CAL FIRE’s Wildfire AI Detector works alongside UCSD’s AlertCalifornia program to monitor over 1,000 cameras throughout the state with AI to detect wildfires. Governor Newsom’s first budget in 2019 funded 100 of these cameras, and the program has grown ever since.
California has suffered the 8 largest wildfires in the state’s history in just the last 6 years. The interlinked network of cameras, AIs, satellites, and humans is an accommodation a decade in the making.
AlertCalifornia enjoys the support of CA utilities companies, the US Forest Service, the CA Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, and county and tribal governments as well. It’s designed to detect more than just fires, but all natural disasters.
Neal Driscoll, a professor at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said that the AI system and its algorithms not only need to detect flames, but also smoke and how smoke is moving. It has to detect which direction the fire might move first, and where first responders would be most effective.
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Many of the cameras that are now monitored with AI have actually been in place for many years. Governing Magazine reports that these cameras have collected petabytes of image and video data on fires, all of which have been used to train AlertCalifornia’s AI.
“We could go back and say, ‘this is what smoke looks like in this image,’” Driscoll told the Magazine. “We were constantly showing different attributes—smoke columns, smoke being bent over—so we could build up enough high-quality data that the AI could detect change or ignition.”
NASA too, has become involved through its network of satellites. The space agency is also contributing remote-operated drones that can fly at night and dump fire retardants on developing fires whilst first responders are on their way.
“We have to move together, leverage resources, and try to mitigate the impacts of these hazards,” Driscoll said, “because they are only going to get worse.”
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