Artificial Intelligence Is Helping to Spot California Wildfires

As 12,000 lightning strikes pummeled the Bay Area this month, igniting hundreds of fires, fire spotters sprang into action. Their arsenal of tools includes thermal imagery collected by space satellites; real-time feeds from hundreds of mountaintop cameras; a far-flung array of weather stations monitoring temperature, humidity and winds; and artificial intelligence to munch and crunch the vast data troves to pinpoint hot spots. For decades, wildfires in remote regions were spotted by people in lookout towers who scanned the horizon with binoculars for smoke -- a tough and tedious job. They reported potential danger by telephone, carrier pigeon or Morse code signals with a mirror. Now, fire spotting has gone high tech.