Just a thought, I could be totally off base here. I'm just not seeing the inherent advantage of a satellite, especially given the cost.
I'm not sure why you'd want to restrict coverage to daylight hours; camping fires are more likely to be lit at night so early spotting makes sense. Likewise I'm not sure you'd want to restrict observation to the summer months, since dry winters are common here and winter wildires are not unknown (eg there was a large one in CO in March of 2011). I don't know whether climate change is a major factor in wildfire incidence year over year, but drier conditions are the sort of effect predicted by theory.
But my main objection is about the size of the observation area. When you take in the # of UAVs, the launch/landing facilities, the fuel costs, the air traffic control overhead, and the data correlation requirements, the satellite doesn't sound so expensive after all.
I worked doing something similar with using weather satellites to detect volcanic eruptions in the north pacific. This is totally feasible in the here and now, whereas I imagine public acceptance of massive surveillance drone use is a bit far off.
Second, the experience of the SD (Cedar) fires which I believe are still the worst in the state of CA [1] this system would likewise be irrelevant. That fire was well known for some time, but other decisions and resource constraints (including legal/policy directives) forced the fire to be triaged in a secondary rank.
I hate to be cynical, but this project really seems like a solution and a grant-money funnel looking for a problem and a pile of cash. The "several hundred millon dollar" pricetag would be better spend on prevention, education, and support of additiona fire-fighting infrastructure. Including preventive maintenace for things like controlled burns, etc.
The notion that we need 200-400 million dollars flying overhead to fight fires caused by trivial mis-behaviour is also astonishing. These fires are often set by people doing things like spilling over an alcohol stove, setting an emergency signal, or doing some other trivial but mis-guided task.
That all being said, the amount of CA forest land that has burned throughout the state in the past 10 years is absolutely insane. I'd encourage people to actively work towards solutions to the general problem.
[1] http://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets/...
The cost of fighting the Rim Fire was $127 million dollars[2], and that doesn't include some much smaller cost to repair the damages it caused (cited to be in the tens of millions by "experts"). The Cedar Fire cost $32 million in firefighting plus 15 lives and 2800 structures. The Zaca Fire cost $117 million to fight. From my perspective it's just a mathematical question whether it would be cheaper to put a satellite in the air vs. other mitigation strategies, and what the cost would be over the lifespan of the satellite for accelerated response vs. typical response. If we plug in the expected value of $200 million in additional funding to awareness I think we will be dissatisfied with the results.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Bear
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rim_Fire
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The Yosemite Rim Fire was man-made and had outsize damages because of inaccesibility and bad policy. Viz:
The fire was caused by a hunter's illegal fire that went out of control
The blaze was difficult to fight because of inaccessible terrain and erratic winds, forcing firefighters to be reactive
Also contributing to the fire was a pre-1980s policy of suppressing small natural fires. The lack of those fires created nearly a century's worth of fuel to burn, resulting in a massive forest fire killing virtually all plant life in its path.
A widespread heat wave and drought conditions helped to spread the fire and make it difficult to combat.
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It takes hours if not days to get men and supplies into some of these locations. On the flip side, the grow very, very quickly. Lets look at the Rim Fire:
Only 40 acres when it was discovered, it grew to 10,000 acres within 36 hours and 100,000 acres after four days.
The premise that a fire is like an ICBM launch that can be shot down before it explodes via star-wars is flawed. Its the sort of thing that people in Ivory towers believe to make themselves feel better. Which is fine, but its not clear at all that such a mindset correlates with reality.
Lets look at the Zaca Fire:
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The Zaca Fire was a wildfire which began burning northeast of Buellton, California, in Santa Barbara County, California. The fire started on July 4, 2007, and by August 31, it had burned over 240,207 acres (972.083 km2), making it California's second largest fire in recorded history after the Cedar Fire of 2003.[1][2] The fire was 100% contained on September 2, 2007.[3] It was declared controlled on October 29, 2007.[4]
The fire was started as a result of sparks from a grinding machine on private property which was being used to repair a water pipe.
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Again, man made fire. People doing stupid things. Entirely preventable. On the flip side, would the Bird save any money by early warning? Highly unlikely. There was no delay in getting at this other than it being called in. So, you would not save any material amount on this.
The order of magnitude of cost savings would appear to be perhaps 1/10 of the actual cost, not 100/100. So, in this case, perhaps you save $12MM on the Rim Fire ans $11MM on the Zaca fire. So, for these two events you save $20MM. At a cost of 200-400 million, you would need to incure 10x to 20x of these large scale fires. But this case would be devastating, if ever incurred. So using it as a rational backdrop seems off. If we are really expecting that, we should adopt strategies of prevention and fuel mitigation as much if not more-so than early warning.
I wasn't trying to imply that the total figures were the likely savings, which is why I explicitly noted it as the cost of an accelerated response vs. a typical response, whatever that may be.
Also, there are thousands of wildfires each year. There is plenty of opportunity to scrape payback out a little at a time, no need for dozens of major incidents.
(I don't have strong feelings about whether such a satellite makes sense, but with early detection capability, maybe it makes sense to increase the capability to drop suppressant on short notice, and so on.)
Empirically, its common for fires that start in very populated areas to still be incredibly damaging. Early warning in these areas does not seem it will materially alter the situation on the ground. Take for example the Powerhouse fire earlier this year in LA. [1] That was visible to the naked eye almost immediately. But the are is a dry, high-desert tinderbox. Ground zero was immediately next to the local San Francisquito <fire station>, yer it took 11 days to contain, and burned 30,000 acres despite its immediate alarm and proximity to roads and fire-fighting gear.
The Yosemite back-country is far more inaccessible and has far more fuel below tree level that the area around the powerhouse fire. I think the notion that once started it could have been contained in under 24 hours to be almost implausible. And once it reached 40 acres, we saw what happened next. Just as a sanity check, Assuming it was 20 miles in to start, it would take 2 days to walk to the area from the nearest road. You will not be dropping in smoke-jumpers like navy seals into this terrain in the middle of the night. Its steep, rugged, and when its not is densley forested. The nearest meadow may be in the next canyon.
In any event, it would be interesting to thing about what we would do with such a system if it were in place. Let's say that we got if for FREE. Then think about the next 200 million of infrastructre that would be required to actually put out the fires more quickly. My guess is that doing this logistical exercise would be more the bottleneck than the actual alert time. The prevelance of cell phones, sat-phones, epirb beacons, and Spot devices greatly increases the ability to comuunicate <SOS>. They do not make it very quick to get help, however. The benhcmark is 24-48 hours at a minimum if you are in a remote area, even with a Helo in many cases.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/06/the-terrible-beau...
[2] The fire station is on the road in the middle of this image of the fire:
https://d2aoguav525b8o.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/re...
That's one advantage of a statellite: it's always looking.
Also, I suspect the UAVs would be more expensive than one might expect, once you factor in the manpower necessary to operate them (pilots and maintainence).
Though, the UVA—satellite tradeoff also requires thinking about how soon you want to see a fire after it's been started. E.g., is 12 hours acceptable?
Also, for those HNers that haven't learned about California forests:
Part of reason we have massive fires today is because in the early 1900s we didn't understand that forests in California depended on fire for regrowth. Loggers didn't like big fires burning down their precious trees, so we suppressed fire with great prejudice[1] - even though the Native Americans used low-intensity fire frequently to manage the forest and we knew that! [2]
So, today, we're still dealing with "insane fires" that we basically set up a century ago when we let much fuel accumulate in the forest. It's still going to take some time (see: decades) before all this excess fuel sorts itself out.
[1] http://ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/files/78651.pdf page 5 [2] ibid page 2
Maybe if we declared a War Against Forest Fires, we can de-weaponize military UAVs and re-appropriate them for fire detection.