How AI Can Help Protect Us From Future Wildfires

Sustainability How AI Can Help Protect Us From Future Wildfires Jamie Hailstone Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about air quality and the environment. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Sep 26, 2022, 06:46am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The abandoned Juniper Lodge motel smolders after burning down during the Tennant fire in Macdoel, . . .

[+] California on July 1, 2021. – Firefighters are battling nearly a dozen wildfires in the region following soaring temperatures in California’s valley, mountain and desert areas, windy dry conditions, lightning storms across several parts of the western United States. (Photo by JOSH EDELSON / AFP) (Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images The 2022 wildfire season in the United States will be one few people will forget in a hurry.

The sheer number and scale of the wildfires this summer will have raised many questions, including whether wildfires will become the new normal, what impact will they have on our health and what can be done to minimise their spread in years to come. Wildfires might appear to be a primeval force, but technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly being used to help predict their spread and mitigate the damage they may cause. Researchers at Stanford University recently developed an AI model for predicting dangerous particle pollution to help track the American West’s rapidly worsening wildfire smoke.

Using satellite data, the Stanford team trained a machine learning model to accurately predict PM2. 5 concentrations from wildfire smoke in areas that don’t have monitors. The results show the number of Americans exposed to unhealthy levels of PM 2.

5 pollution caused by wildfire smoke has risen 27-fold over the last decade. Dr. Mike Flaxman, product manager at HEAVY.

AI, said artificial intelligence and machine learning allows researchers to “clean up data” around air quality and weather patterns and predict possible wildfires in a way that is much faster than before. “It’s not a controversial use of AI,” he told Forbes. “It’s a workaday solution to a problem that that would otherwise be overwhelming.

” He said AI has the ability to look through 100 times more data than a human wants to spend their day going through, and then identify any issues that the human needs to look at. MORE FOR YOU Is Carbon Capture Another Fossil Fuel Industry Con? Sustainable Fashion Wants Brands To Redefine Business Growth Trouble With Predicting Future Of Transportation Is That Today Gets In The Way Dr. Flaxman added that AI is already being used to predict air quality in many parts of the world, helped by thousands of satellites up in the sky, whose data is “growing leaps and bounds” He added that the potential for AI applications in this area is huge, because 80 or 90% of the weather data currently being collected by businesses and governments is still not being analysed properly.

“You used to have one image every 14 days and it could take me six months to process it, but now we have the information collected by ground sensors all over the country. People are adding little weather stations in their backyard. These sensors are in the middle of the environment and that allows you to take satellite data and fill in the gaps with ground data.

It gives you a very powerful combination. ” He said this network of sensors is particularly important for air quality because it can be “unevenly distributed” in many areas. “Living near a highway is one thing, living in California is another, and so is living in Northern California.

The question is how do you deal with something like air quality, which is quite complicated in its distribution?” He said some of the consequences of air pollution are perfectly measurable, like the number of children being admitted into local hospital. Although he added measuring cumulative exposure to toxic air requires more long-term monitoring. HEAVY.

AI’s CEO, Jon Kondo said that in terms of measuring wildfires, there are three factors are terrain, the weather and vegetation. In recent years, there have been real breakthroughs in how satellites monitor the moisture in the ground, which means predictions about where wildfires are likely to break out have become more advanced. Looking ahead, Kondo said there needs to be need improvements in both long-term and short-term wildfire planning.

“When you have months to prepare, you have a lot of mitigation options, including fuel reduction and equipment hardening or replacement,” he added. “Under dangerous conditions and when a fire is raging, pre-positioning people and equipment becomes critical to both response and recovery. “We’ve learned the hard way in California that while having a plan is great, we are now dealing with unprecedented extreme conditions,” said Kondo.

“Our response must include widespread adaptive capacity, not just relying on centralized authorities, but reaching into communities and to individual homeowners. We need to arm more people with better information faster. But since these data streams are both huge and dynamic, a new generation of tools is needed to make them more widely accessible.

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