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DENVER (AP) — As wildfires grow larger and more devastating as the West dries and warms, agencies and officials tasked with preventing fires and fighting blazes may soon have a new tool in their arsenal of burn, pickaxe, chain. saws and plane.
High-tech aid may come from a field not normally associated with bushfire fighting: artificial intelligence. And space.
Headquartered in Jefferson County, Lockheed Martin Space draws on decades of experience in operating satellites, exploring space, and providing information to help the US military deliver more accurate data to ground crews faster. They talk to the U.S. Forest Service, university researchers, and a Colorado state agency about how their technology can help.
Lockheed Martin representatives say that by generating more timely information about site conditions and running computer programs to process large volumes of data, they can map fire environments in minutes instead of the hours it might currently take. They say that artificial intelligence, or artificial intelligence and machine learning, that the company has applied for military use can improve predictions about the direction and speed of a fire.
“The scenario in which wilderness firefighters and commanders work is very similar to that of the organizations and people defending our homeland and our allies. “This is a dynamic environment that spans multiple activities and responsibilities,” said Dan Lordan, senior director of AI integration at Lockheed Martin’s Center for Artificial Intelligence.
Rich Carter, Lockheed Martin Space’s business development director for Mission Solutions, said Lockheed Martin aims to use its technology developed over the years in other areas to reduce the time it takes to gather information and make decisions about wildfires.
“The faster you react, the faster you can hopefully contain the fire and protect people’s property and lives,” Carter said.
The notion of a regular fire season has almost disappeared as drought and higher temperatures made the Western lands ready to ignite. In late December, the Marshall fire burned 991 homes in Boulder County and killed two people. The Denver area experienced its third driest April ever, with just 0.06 inches of humidity, according to the National Weather Service.
Colorado received more fire warnings in April than any other April in the past 15 years. The crew quickly contained the wind-induced fires that required evacuations along the Front Range and on the Eastern Plains. But six families in Monte Vista lost their homes in April when a fire burned part of the southern Colorado town.
Since 2014, the Colorado Department of Fire Prevention and Control has flown aircraft equipped with infrared and color sensors to detect wildfires and provide crews on the ground with the most up-to-date information possible. The onboard equipment is integrated with the Colorado Wildfire Information System, a database that provides images and details to local fire managers.
“We found about 200 new fires last year that no one knew about,” said Bruce Dikken, the agency’s multi-purpose aircraft program unit chief. “I don’t know if any of these 200 fires will turn into major fires. I know they didn’t turn into big fires because we found them.”
Dikken said that when two Pilatus PC-12 planes began flying in 2014, Colorado was the only state with such a program, relaying information “in near real time.” Lockheed Martin representatives recently spent time in the air on airplanes to see if AI could speed up the process.
“We don’t find every fire we fly over, and if we can use some kind of technology that can automatically plot the fire perimeter, for example, it could definitely be faster,” Dikken said. “Right now, it’s a very manual process.”
It could take hours to map something like the 2020 Cameron Peak fire, Colorado’s largest wildfire at 208,663 acres, Dikken said.
And often people on planes follow several fires at once. The faster they can collect and process data around a fire, the faster they can move on to the next fire, Dikken said. If it takes a few hours to map a fire, he said, “What I originally drew might be a little different now.”
Lordan said Lockheed Martin engineers, who flew with state crews, were able to produce fire maps in as little as 15 minutes using video and images collected from the flights.
Dikken said the company was speaking to the government about the possibility of carrying an additional computer that could help “crack all that information” and forward a map of the fire to crews on the ground while it’s still in flight. The agency expects to hear the results of Lockheed Martin’s experiences in aircraft and how AI can help the government, he added.
– “Actionable intelligence”
The company is also talking to researchers at the U.S. Forest Service Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana. Mark Finney, a research forester, said talks with Lockheed Martin were still early.
“They have a strong interest in applying their skills and talents to the wildfire problem, and I think that would be welcome,” Finney said.
Finney said the lab in Missoula has been involved in fire research since 1960 and has developed many of the fire management tools used for operations and planning. “We’re in a pretty good position to understand where new things and capabilities could be used in the future, and some of that certainly could be.”
However, Lockheed Martin is focused on technology, and Finney said, “this is not where our efforts will be used most effectively.”
“Prevention and mitigation and preventive-type management activities are places where there are great opportunities to change the trajectory we are on,” Finney said. “Improving reactive management is unlikely to yield major benefits because the underlying source of the problem is climate change as well as the fuel structure of large tracts of land.”
Logging and projected burns or fires started under controlled conditions are some of the management practices used to get rid of fuel sources or create a more diverse landscape. But Finney said these methods sometimes meet with resistance.
As bad as the Cameron Peak fire was, Finney said the predicted burns of Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests over the years reduced the fire’s intensity and changed the movement of the flames in spots.
“Unfortunately, they didn’t have time to finish the work they had planned,” Finney said.
Lordan said the value of artificial intelligence, whether in preventing or responding to fires, is to generate accurate and timely information for fire managers, and he calls it “actionable intelligence.”
One example is information collected and managed by federal agencies on vegetation types and conditions across the country, Lordan said. He said that updates are done every 2-3 years. Lockheed Martin uses data from satellites managed by the European Space Agency, which updates relevant information every five days.
Lockheed is working with Nvidia, a California software company, to produce a digital simulation of a wildfire based on an area’s topography, vegetation, wind and weather to help predict where and how it will burn. After the event, the companies used information about the Cameron Peak fire by plugging in more recent satellite data on fuel conditions and created a video simulation that Lordan said was similar to the behavior and movement of the real fire.
While appreciating the help the technology provides, both with the state of Colorado Dikken and the Forest Service, Finney said “baseline verification” will always be needed by people.
Lockheed Martin spokesman Chip Eschenfelder said applying artificial intelligence to fighting wildfires is not about getting people out of the loop. “Someone will always be in the loop, but people who are currently in the loop are surrounded by so much data that they can’t sort fast enough. That’s where that comes from.”
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