While the news cycle may feel the things as we get caught up in an ever-growing dumpster fire, for certain states in the country, those flames are anything but metaphorical. This week 15 different states were hit with dozens of massive, roaring wildfires shaking hundreds of thousands of acres of land while setting tens of millions of people off in damaging ways. And by all accounts, things will go smoothly Becomes less from Here.
Tech companies can put out a horrible fire not only with digital smarts, but some Silicon Valley startups have spent the past few years I think with tools to track where fires are and where they could then go. And now Google is throwing its hat in the ring: Today, the company announced intends to roll out what can only be described as a wildfire mapping network.
Using Google Search to search for questions about a wildfire will not only be met with a series of increasingly alarming news segments on the subject, but also a real-time map outlining the boundaries where that particular fire rages. People who have Google Mapps installed on their phone, meanwhile, can get handy alerts that tell them if they are traveling a little too close to an active lodge, and potentially safer paths to their destination.
The company put out a fairly detailed outline Medium blog that’s about the sharpest part of how these maps are made, but the short version is just … satellites. Using data extracted from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s massive network of satellites and then overlapping that on the al massive cards compiled by the Google Earth Engine, the company can track where the fire is burning, and about how far it can spread. As the company’s blog explains, NOAA’s satellites were created to “hot spotsOver the earth’s surface, which contain natural fires.
As Yossi Matias, the engineering VP behind Google’s emergency and crisis response technology, describes in the corporate blog, this is an idea that has been circulating around his head for decades. Back in 2010, he was working from a Google campus in Haifa, Israel, when the country was struck by the least wildfire that it had ever experienced. The epicenter of the blaze, over in Mount Carmel, was barely a half-hour drive from where Matias and his team sat. When they went online to find out what the hell was going on – and whether they were safe – the web barely came into all the information except “some details that confirmed what we already knew – there was a big fire outside our door , “he writes.
That’s what initially inspired him to push for more emergency response features in Google search, starting with full extinguishing SOS alerts back in 2017 to focus people on authoritative Intel during a natural disaster. Since then, the company has shifted to other forms of climate crisis control: using its mapping machine to predict where floods can beat or convert all Android devices in one mini-seismometer to better detect earthquakes.
G / O Media can get a commission
According to Matias, this new fire prediction feature has been in the works for about a year, and was first piloted as a tool for first responders struggling with the brutal wave of wildfires that struck California in 2019. After receiving the target from authorities in California and Colorado at the time, the company announced that it would roll out the boundary maps in Search and Maps today.
With climate change, temperatures around the world are spreading and record fires are spreading Australia no California to the Arctic this year alone, the feature should be useful for just about everyone.
.
