How Artificial Intelligence Is Fighting Wildfires

Good morning.

In 2003, Dr. Ilkay Altintas, a computer scientist with the University of California, San Diego, had her first wildfire encounter. She had been in Santa Barbara for a workshop and couldn’t take the train home.

“The track was gone,” she recalled this week.

So she hitched a ride with a colleague. She remembers seeing the ocean on one side of her and fire on the other as they drove. “It was like heaven and hell.”

That year, fires tore through the San Diego region, leaving 16 people dead and 2,400 homes destroyed. One of the blazes, the Cedar fire, was at the time the largest in California history, burning more than 273,000 acres.

Since then, that record has been demolished as climate change has lengthened fire seasons and caused the blazes themselves to burn hotter and faster. Last year, five of the six largest fires in the state’s known history together chewed through nearly 2.5 million acres. The Cedar fire is now the state’s eighth-largest blaze, and the only one in the top 10 to have taken place before 2010.

But, as Altintas told me, technology has also advanced in the years since 2003. That, she said, can help both prevent out-of-control wildfires and minimize the destruction they cause.

“It gives us hope,” she said.

Altintas is the founder and director of the university’s WIFIRE Lab, where she and her team have worked over the past eight years to use data to help fire managers and scientists.

And in the last decade or so, the quantity of data has increased. A lot.

Where once there were basic weather cameras used by surfers, there are now vast systems taking in almost real-time satellite views, sensing wind patterns, tracking utility service and more.

All that information, coupled with troves of data about past blazes, can be used with artificial intelligence to quickly predict how fires will burn once they have ignited, and to help plan measures, like prescribed burns, aimed at preventing bigger, more dangerous fires.

“It’s been an information revolution,” Altintas said.

She demonstrated the lab’s fire map, which she said was used to help fight every major fire in the state. The interface was intuitive, like a more colorful Google map.

Altintas clicked on filters that showed ongoing fires in detail — where they were actively burning and where they had already been — along with the areas that had been burned by fires in the past. She said she could pull up camera views from weather stations or see how a given fire might have burned if conditions had been different, and how close it would have come to where people live.

This, she said, helps fire officials decide where to send resources to battle a fast-moving blaze and which areas to evacuate.

A product known as BurnPro 3D showed, as the name suggests, three-dimensional images of vegetation down to a one-meter resolution. That can help fire managers prioritize where they should intentionally light fires when it’s safe to do so, because they can see where fuels have built up to dangerous levels.

In coming years, Altintas said, she hopes the fire map and BurnPro 3D will help significantly streamline the permitting process for prescribed burns and will be able to help predict where there is a risk for landslides or flooding.

“Those are all very relatable things that can happen at any time,” she said. “So we want to pull together the data and modeling community to model those as fast as we can.”

Ultimately, she emphasized that one of the lab’s most important functions is making data — and tools for analyzing it — accessible to a wide range of collaborators across the country.

That, Altintas said, is the only way that scientists and officials can even attempt to keep up with rapidly changing environmental challenges.

“The main thing here is we can’t just react,” she said. “We need more people to say, ‘We can do something about it.’”

For more:

• Follow all of The Times’s heat wave and wildfire coverage here.

• California spent more than $1 billion on emergency wildfire suppression last year, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

• Read about how that’s a fraction of the total cost of wildfires, including damages and health consequences.

• The Los Angeles Times reports that fires have burned more than 140,000 acres so far this year in California, with the biggest blazes burning faster and hotter than some firefighters have seen this early in the year.

• Explore WIFIRE Lab’s Firemap, developed with the Orange County Fire Authority, CalOES, the Los Angeles County Fire Department and more.

• And learn more about WIFIRE Commons, developed with federal agencies, the Los Alamos National Lab and dozens of other partners.

Here’s what else to know today

• The close ties between coroners and law enforcement have fueled an unusual and unregulated industry: for-profit forensic examinations, The New York Times Magazine reports.

• NBC Los Angeles discussed the homelessness crisis with former Gov. Jerry Brown. In their conversation, Brown, the 34th and 39th governor of California, also gave his thoughts on police reform.

• Across the U.S., the cost of living has been rising at its steepest levels in 13 years. In California, the biggest changes tend to be housing and the price of oil, and some economists believe it could get worse, The Fresno Bee reports.

• The South Coast Air Quality Management District said Southern California’s July 4 fireworks show created the second-highest air pollution levels from the holiday in the last decade, KTLA reports.

• A 17-million-gallon sewage spill closed a stretch of beaches from El Segundo to the southern end of Playa del Rey to swimmers, ABC7 reports.

• The Los Angeles-based rapper Zerail Dijon Rivera, who performed under the name Indian Red Boy, was killed Thursday in an ambush shooting that was captured on Instagram live, Yahoo News reports.

• Zenia Mucha, who has been responsible for protecting and polishing the Disney brand for 19 years, announced on Tuesday that she would step down next year. As the company’s combative chief communications officer, she was known as the power behind the power.

• Surfing will make its Olympic debut at the Summer Games in Tokyo. However, some Indigenous people of Hawaii view this as their sport being vilified and capitalized, The Associated Press reports.

• Theaters are getting a boost in the form of a $50 million one-time subsidy under a $262 billion California state budget agreement signed this week by Gov. Gavin Newsom.