Ben Twomey, Director of Product Management – Wildfire, AEM looks at revolutionising wildfire monitoring and response

With the increasing threat of wildfires around the world, it has become paramount for government agencies to improve their monitoring and response systems.

By leveraging data fusion, cities and counties are redefining their approach.

This amalgamation of technologies such as camera-based ignition detection, advanced lightning discernment, and innovative smoke analysis is setting a new standard in the field.

AEM us a leading environmental insights company, is at the forefront of this transformation, working closely with various agencies to integrate these diverse data streams and thus enhance wildfire detection, improve risk evaluation, and speed up response times.

Our mission is to empower communities and organisations to survive – and thrive – in the face of escalating environmental risks.

To fulfil that mission, AEM has brought together experienced companies to create technology solutions that mitigate the risk of extreme environmental events including flooding, wildfires, and severe weather and to offer a range of both affordable and high-end offerings, available directly and through its partners around the world.

AEM’s role in wildfire safety is a core part of our multi-hazard approach to resilience.

As a business, we are uniquely equipped to contribute to wildfire safety as part of our broader multi-hazard resilience capabilities.

It is extremely rare to find a business who provides end to end solutions across the resiliency space.

We provide the design services, hardware (cameras, weather stations, air quality sensors, lightning detection sensors and more), deployment and commissioning to monitor the environment with world leading detail and reliability.

 Perhaps more importantly, we bring all our sensor feeds together via our collaborative software solutions which can be tailored for each customer’s specific resilience needs.

What is data fusion?

No one source of data can provide all the current and forecasted intelligence needed to reliably and accurately guide wildfire response, preparedness and preventative decision making.

The primary motivation behind adopting data fusion and a multi-source resilience intelligence strategy is to ensure we maximise the accuracy, reliability, and precision of our decision support capability.

Considering data from multiple independent sources together can change the level of confidence for a given environmental detection like a wildfire ignition.

 For example, if local air quality sensors detect a possible smoke source nearby but no other sources register, then the user might note this but not action it.

If we then add that recent lightning strike data shows a high current ground strike in the same vicinity as the air quality information, then these two pieces of information increase the chance there has been an ignition.

Finally, if the user now receives a camera-based AI smoke detection alert from the same area, confidence in an ignition detection increases again.

The user organisation can adopt different systematic responses based on the level of confidence due to types and strengths of multi-source, fused data.

Generally, as more independent sensors report a detection, confidence increases, and user conclusions and actions become more assured.

AEM is moving rapidly towards delivering customers exactly this sort of fused decision support through an intuitive and easy-to-configure-and-action user experience.

Quality and accuracy of all field-based sensors requires appropriate and regular calibration and maintenance.

Coupled with this, we provide intelligent systems that report sensor status so it is visible in our software.

In the specific case of AI-based camera ignition detection, we ensure users can easily see when the AI is functioning.

In addition, users provide feedback on receipt of detection notifications as to whether it was a true or false positive, or if they have experienced a false negative (i.e., there was a smoke column, but the system failed to detect it).

This feedback essentially helps to continually refine and improve the AI process.

Community impact

Many communities and local governments already operate AEM software to view data coming from weather stations and flood monitoring systems installed in the region as well real-time lightning data.

Enabling the wildfire capabilities in our software and deploying additional wildfire detection elements in the field is relatively trivial.

We also provide community alert sirens and audio messaging systems to provide public notification.

The resilience benefits to communities begin when the local authorities start to configure the alerts and notifications capabilities in our software to systematise their detection and response actions and thus respond much earlier with much more thorough situational information.

Beyond detection and response, our wildfire capability will also offer the latest quantitative forecast of wildfire conditions and potential fire behaviour.

This will enable authorities acting on behalf of communities to easily configure preparedness alerts days and possibly weeks in advance to enable mitigation and avoidance actions before severe conditions impact the community.

Future plans

The changing environment and climate require us to be proactive and adopt a strategy that enables us to operationalise the very latest science and expertise on behalf of our customers.

We strive to do this in a way that is easy to understand and action inside our customers’ resiliency processes.

Our R&D capability underpins continuous improvements to our environmental monitoring systems.

Our hazard-specific scientists and operational specialists ensure our software keeps pace with the resilience needs of our customers.

Finally, where we don’t provide the technology solution in-house, we will always seek to partner with the best available technology service providers to ensure we deliver the best outcomes.

AEM prides itself on being a good partner to others and partnering with the best providers of data and technology.

We believe strongly in customer-guided solutions, and as such we are highly collaborative with our customers.

We also have staff that represent their technical professions on national and international governing bodies.

For wildfire solutions in particular we leverage the best available input data from a range of public and private sources and apply our own processing stages to yield the very best characterisation of landscape conditions, fuel type, structure, arrangement and condition.

We combine this with the best technology to generate unprecedented predictive quality to support wildfire preparedness and decision making.

These activities ensure our collaboration and partnerships result in the best possible avoidance of risk, and when events occur, we enable the best possible response to minimise harm.

This article was originally published in the November 2023 issue of International Fire & Safety Journal. To read your FREE digital copy, click here.