Alberta is investing in artificial intelligence in an effort to predict where a wildfire may ignite before it happens, a move its tech partners say could save up to $5-million a year.
“In the past and currently, we know what we have for fuels , we know what’s available to burn, and we know through our weather forecasting how bad the weather is going to be.” “The problem that we’ve been faced with is we don’t know where the next fire is going to start,” he said. “So every day, they have duty officers whose job is to figure out for the next day, what pre-suppression resources they have on retainer,” Erickson said. “In the past, this was purely based on fire severity.”
Trenchard said “working with AltaML has given us an opportunity to bridge the knowledge gap from an experienced person to maybe a less experienced duty officer able to have that tool available to them.” “Using that history, combined with weather forecasting, that’s what the model is using essentially,” he said. “And it’s building on itself, so every calendar year, we dump that last calendar year of data into the black box of AI to improve the prediction over time.”“The future vision of this is actually going to be like a pinpoint location on a map for where the next fires are going to start tomorrow, and then we will place resources close or as close as we can to those predictions.