For over half a century, the first line of wildfire defense consisted of humans perched on towers hundreds of feet in the air.
Fire lookout towers played an essential role in detecting wildfires since even before the USFS was founded in 1905. The Great Fire of 1910, also known as the Big Blowup, enshrined the towers as cornerstones of the country’s new, now discredited, full fire suppression regime. The lookouts were largely decommissioned between the 1960s and the 1990s after technological advancements in radio communication, aircraft, and even satellites gained favor over the human eye.
The tech advancements, however, lacked two things fire lookouts excelled at: spotting fires early and when they’re small. Even the most advanced modern satellites can detect wildfires only after they burn around three acres. Acreage burned is also updated only a few times daily with low-resolution images.
Google is trying to solve both those issues, not by returning to fire lookout towers, but with a multi-million dollar satellite “constellation” to begin launching next year.
The program, called “FireSat,” is a collaboration between Google, the Earth Fire Alliance, and Muon Space. The program is slated to launch around 52 satellites, starting in early 2025 and continuing through 2026, with the goal of providing global high-resolution images updated every 20 minutes to enable early detection of wildfires roughly the size of a classroom.
The satellites reportedly have an expected lifespan of five to seven years, so researchers predict they’ll have to launch 10 satellites annually to keep the program going once it’s up and running.
“Using AI, FireSat will rapidly compare any 5×5 meter spot on earth with previous imagery, while also combining factors like nearby infrastructure and local weather, to determine if there’s a fire,” Google said. “In addition to supporting emergency response efforts, FireSat’s data will be used to create a global historical record of fire spread, helping Google and scientists to better model and understand wildfire behavior and spread.”
Researchers also committed to offer the data as open source and for free to fire agencies and climate researchers around the world.
The news may set off alarm bells for those well-versed in U.S. wildfire history. Early-intervention has often been coupled with the fire-tower era full-suppression strategies, a major reason why increasingly severe and larger fires have become more frequent over time.
Researchers, however, affirmed the healthy aspects fire has on some landscapes. They also stressed this new technology wasn’t made with full suppression in mind, but rather as a means to give fire crews and managers the most up-to-date data in order to make the best decisions for managing fire.
“We really want to focus on reducing the size, frequency, and damage of hot and fast fires, and encouraging, as much as we can, slow and cool fires because we need a lot of slow, cool fire in order for ecosystems to improve,” said former Cal State Fire Marshal and Moore Foundation Senior Advisor Kate Dargan. “FireSat, because it will tell us not just where fires are, but also how hot they’re burning…we can develop new strategies for fire management that isn’t just ‘put it out’.”
It will take multiple years for all the program’s satellites to launch, but it will take longer for the system to be fully operational. The first phase of FireSat will strictly be gathering data and sifting through it so fire managers can actually use it without worrying about false positives.
“In the satellite image of the Earth a lot of things can be mistaken for a fire,” said Earth Fire Alliance Chairman and Google Research Climate & Energy Lead Researcher Chris Van Arsdale. “A glint, a hot roof, smoke from another fire covering something that’s warm in the background. There are a lot more of these than real fires, and so detecting fires becomes a game of looking for needles in a world of haystacks.”
Once the false-positive problem is solved, fire managers and scientists will be able to use the data as a visual history of all fires globally. Wildfires will reportedly be tracked step-by-step from when they start to when they are extinguished, which will help researchers better understand fire behavior on the global scale.
Many departments, counties, states and even international countries, especially in the Global South, often face hurdles to this kind of technology due to financial constraints or lack of technological infrastructure. Google researchers said they’re working with partners throughout the globe to identify which aspects of the data they most need and how to best get it to them.
“For example, in Brazil and Indonesia, those are largely regional partnerships where either a government organization or a conservation organization serves our distributor to make sure the data is actually hitting the ground and being used by the agencies themselves,” Earth Fire Alliance Executive Director Brian Collins said.
Agencies interested in joining the program’s Early Adopter Program can reach out to Earth Fire Alliance Community Organizer Ann Kapusta at ann@earthfirealliance.org or get updates by signing up at the Earth Fire Alliance website.