What role can drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play in early detection? Are there specialized sensors or thermal imaging techniques that can be deployed to identify wildfires in their early stages, especially in remote or inaccessible areas?
Not sure the juice is worth the squeeze considering we have the fire guard program, and you are talking about back country scenarios that dont impact humans long after the sun comes up and we figure it out by our other means available to us.
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I’m intrigued by the fire guard program you mentioned. I recently joined a project that utilizes NLP models for early wildfire detection, specifically focused on alerting people about possible fires in California along with their locations. I believe our work could potentially contribute to the program’s efforts. Is there a way for us to explore collaboration or participate in the program?
Contact Sean Triplett. There is a link on this website towards the bottom.
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2024 Drone Incursions
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You gotta see this!
My inner Wx nerd had to share this content. Its really quite amazing & beautiful & frightening.
It makes me thankful that the Holocene has been a mostly “quiet” Wx regime for my lifetime - very relieved that extreme events don’t happen on a diurnal basis every day of the year!!
#stormchase #supercells #tornado #convection&lightning
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As a fellow Wx geek and UAS student pilot I’ve seen lots of drone and tornado videos. This one, however, is worthy of a watch. It was very interesting and had shots and angles I’ve never seen before. Very well made and put together. Definitely appreciate the suggestion.
Because of the inherent and critical necessity of deconfliction to maintain aircraft and personal safety and maintaining an operational airspace during wildland fires, we may never get an opportunity to study wind and fire dynamics that create physics in chaos from the same vantage point. If it could ever be orchestrated under safe and controlled conditions we would probably learn that we need to revise some/many of our thoughts on ember cast, long range ember transport, fluid dynamics, and the chaos of physics large fires create.
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100% down with what you are saying! Your words make me reflect on “recent” fires where there was documented 41 mile runs,10 mile runs & 40,000 acres in a day fire behavior - sure woulda/coulda been enlightening to have those high energy release moments captured from new angles and vantage points for further study! Makes me also wonder what Albini & Rothermel would have done with drones and how it might have contributed to changes in the fire spread equation/fire spread model that we still use today.
In one of Albini’s papers from 1984 he noted;
“The list of poorly understood phenomena can be expected to lengthen for some time to come because research in this field is still in its infancy. As the base of knowledge grows, new puzzles will emerge, and explanations that were once accepted will be challenged as their implications are explored.”
This makes me wonder what “new puzzles” might be exposed if drones could be used in those off limits places & what if any current paradigms might their observations challenge?
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