Carl Pennypacker
(SSL)

E-FUEGO: Fire Urgency Estimator on Geosynchronous Orbit:
Developing New Paradigms for Fire Data Acquisition, Analysis, and Simulation

Over the last decade, substantial progress in imaging devices, geosynchronous-basing of payloads, computation and simulation clearly enable a new era of fire detection and management. And wildfires will most certainly become a growing threat to more Californians and many people on our planet. For example, ~6% of California's total CO2 contribution is due to wildfires, and this number will surely increase over the next decade. The total cost to the United States of wildfires, including property, eco-system, etc., damage, is almost certainly greater than $20B a year. These costs can almost certainly be reduced by large factors with our existing and future technologies here from the LBNL/UCB and the commercial sector.

In response, our LBNL/SSL and greater E-FUEGO collaboration are gradually assembling local and globally based resources, partners, and ideas to make continuous progress at a number of poignant and useful altitudes. We are beginning to develop and deploy various platforms to find new and manage existing fires. We are currently piloting a scheme for automated fire detection from fire lookout towers, and developing high-time and high spatial resolution imagers from manned aircraft and UAV's. Considerable opportunities exist now for the acquisition and use of big data, and we want E-FUEGO to be one of the pathfinders for this use. I will endeavor to describe such progress on several of our altitude regimes, and plans on how we are gradually finding some congruences with greater society for funding such efforts. Many federal, state, and local agencies are stakeholders in this situation, but to date, E-FUEGO is one of the few efforts with almost guaranteed promise of long term help. Non-technical LBNL staff and colleagues are cordially invited!