This article first appeared on How We Get to Next

An excerpt from Stop, Drop, and Scroll: How Big Data and smart sensors are changing firefighting

…Sensors are becoming more common in street lamps, weather stations, and electrical towers, meaning wildfires could come in contact with plenty of opportunities to transmit their information.

San Diego County in California is a perfect example. In the early 2000s, the local energy company added weather stations and wind monitors to its electrical grid to keep an eye on the problematic Santa Ana winds. Those sensors, in conjunction with quad-directional cameras, provided the perfect opportunity for wildfire monitoring. Soon, researchers at University of California, San Diego, realized that the data being collected could be even more useful. They wanted to predict the unpredictable.

Fires are hard to model; wildfires even more so. “The best you can do is to be ahead of the fire and predict what’s going to happen so you can manage it,” said Dr. Ilkay Altintas, the chief data science officer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Altintas and a team of researchers started work onWIFIRE (a portmanteau of “WiFi” and “wildfire”). With WIFIRE, the researchers plan to model the future paths of wildfires, displaying a visual version of data coming in from sensors on a screen either at a stationary command center or on portable tablets that can be moved from incident to incident…