Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
By almost any available metric, wildfires are becoming an increasing threat in the United States every year--number of fires, number of acres burned, size of fires, value of property destroyed, and number of lives lost. One factor that exacerbates the impact of wildfires is many of them are occurring at the wildland-urban interface (WUI), the zone of transition where human development encroaches on unoccupied land. As human development continues to sprawl, an increasing number of structures and lives are at risk. Early detection of wildfires and accurate determination of where fires are and where they go is essential for effective firefighting and public safety. As other factors like climate change, drought, and extreme weather appear to become more pronounced, the frequency and severity of wildfires will continue to get worse.The GeoFire WAS uses heat to track and predict wildfires in real-time without false alarms. Rugged ground-based sensors are deployed at high density, enabling wildfires to be detected and reported quickly within the coverage area. The fire location is known with hyper precision, down to the resolution of the sensor spacing, which is critical to recognizing adjacent fire cells as two separate cells and not one. The inherent resiliency of the self-healing sensor network ensures effective coverage is maintained even with the failure of an individual sensor. No other ground- or satellite-based wildfire detection system has this combination of spatial resolution, response time, accuracy, and fault tolerance.When deployed in target areas such as residential neighborhoods at the wildland urban interface, industrial and commercial campuses, or high-voltage power lines, the GeoFire WASdelivers community and asset protection at an unprecedented scale, which allows government and commercial stakeholders to make timely and effective decisions about wildfire mitigation efforts to prevent property loss and loss of life.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
50%
Developmental
50%
Goals / Objectives
The program objective is to build, test, and deploy the GeoFire Real-Time Wildfire Alert System (WAS) to definitively answer where a wildfire is right now and where it is heading next. This is accomplished by using a high-density sensor network to track the location and growth of individual wildfire cells in real time. The GeoFire WAS is designed for exceptionally reliable operation: accurate fire detection without false alarms, autonomous operation without human-in-the-loop interaction, sufficient resiliency to tolerate the failure of individual sensors without compromising system coverage, and rugged hardware construction for 10+ year lifetime operation in all weather conditions. With its combination of spatial resolution, response time, accuracy, and fault tolerance, the GeoFire WAS is intended to augment existing ground- and satellite-based wildfire detection systems.
Project Methods
The project goals will be accomplished by designing and building sensors with wireless mesh networking and satellite transmission, demonstrating wireless mesh networking over distances on the order of kilometers, demonstrate communication between the network and cloud using a satellite gateway, generating alert transmissions when exposed to fire, completing field testing of the system during an outdoor burn, and deploying the system covering community-sized areas over an extended period of time. The projectwill determine the efficacy of the GeoFire WAS to detect wildfires. If successful, the system will be further refined to improve cost, size, and power consumption as the project advances.