“In fires, especially, time is compressed so much that you have to apply technology to make decisions within a time frame so that you can influence the outcome of what is happening,” Collins said.
While satellites and AI Tech may provide better data, it is crucial that the data puts it right-handed, said Krystal Azelton, senior director of Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates sustainable space policy.
“The AI trends that assist all of this obviously produce better results, but that doesn’t necessarily produce consistent results,” Azelton said. “It’s a very big positive because one of my biggest concerns about any environmental surveillance from space is the people who provide the data, how do you communicate the data to the end user?” Azelton said. “There are a lot of technical solutions out there, but how do you take them into the hands of the person who actually uses it?
Van Arsdale said the goal of the fire satellite team is to make it track data as accessible as possible and to work directly with the fire agency.
“There are this kind of fire-related wars related to fires and you don’t know where they started,” Van Arsdale said. “We’re going to give you photos of everything you might care about.”
Speed running
While more information is often available in disaster situations, it is not clear whether such satellite detection is much faster than it currently exists. A camera network deployed like AlertWildFire is the first to spot a fire across the West Coast, including the deadly Palisade fire in Los Angeles last January. There is also the fact that while the fire camera may be able to put out the fire the moment it starts to fire, having that information does not mean that firefighters will be able to mobilize and burn in time.
Climate scientist Daniel Swain runs a blog about weather and has long tracked wildfires, but while satellite-based updates may not solve all the reality of response time, it is for sharing information with people at risk and allowing people to share information as the fire spreads.
“It doesn’t really solve the core potential, but it can be a useful thing,” Swain said. “It does help to know exactly where to be as soon as possible. Unfortunately, in the most extreme conditions, this doesn’t give us a big advantage.”
These fire SAT efforts are also being carried out at a time when technology investments are aimed at combating wildfires. That is, private companies looking to help build new fire protection solutions to advance and profit from the technology. In June, President Trump signed an executive order to fight wildfires in a “common sense” way, which calls for priority to the efforts of fire tech companies, while also bringing federal disaster agencies together and directing federal agencies to “decrypt historical satellite data to improve wildfire predictions, revise or eliminate obstacles to wildfire detection, prevention, prevention, prevention, prevention and response.”
