New technologies could detect fires faster, giving first responders a head start. In February 2024, a broken utility pole brought down power lines near the small town of Stinnett, Texas. In the following weeks, the fire reportedly sparked by that equipment grew to burn over 1 million acres, the biggest wildfire in the state's history. The full FireSat system should be able to detect tiny fires anywhere in the world, and provide updated images every 20 minutes. Anything from stray fireworks to lightning strikes can start a wildfire. While it's natural for many ecosystems to see some level of fire activity, the hotter, drier conditions brought on by climate change are fueling longer fire seasons with larger fires that burn more land.

The images and analysis will be provided free to fire agencies around the world, helping to improve understanding of where fires are, where they're moving, and how hot they're burning. The information could help agencies stamp out small fires before they turn into raging infernos, place limited firefighting resources where they'll do the most good, and evacuate people along the safest paths. "In the satellite image of the Earth, a lot of things can be mistaken for a fire: a glint, a hot roof, smoke from another fire," says Chris Van Arsdale, climate and energy research lead at Google Research and chairman of the Earth Fire Alliance. "Detecting fires becomes a game of looking for needles in a world of haystacks. Solving this will enable first responders to act quickly and precisely when a fire is detected."

Beyond that, the alerts can help first responders arrive more quickly, too. While a motorist or airplane pilot may call in a smoke report for a general area, Descartes' text-based tool narrows down where the fire is. "That's very beneficial," Griego said, "especially at night when it's hard to determine what mountain range this fire's actually on when you're on top of a peak 20 miles away." The need for all manner of fire-fighting solutions is growing as climate change worsens wildfires across California and the Southwestern US. Wildfires blazed through California's wine country and the Los Angeles area in October, less than a year after a devastating fire leveled the California town of Paradise.

San Francisco (CNN Business)As wildfire season raged in California this fall, a startup a few states away used artificial intelligence to pinpoint the location of blazes there within minutes -- in some cases far faster than these fires might otherwise be noticed by firefighters or civilians. Santa Fe-based Descartes Labs, which uses AI to analyze satellite imagery, launched its US wildfire detector in July. The company's AI software pores over images coming in roughly every few minutes from two different US government weather satellites, in search of any changes -- the presence of smoke, a shift in thermal infrared data showing hot spots -- that could indicate a fire has ignited. Descartes is testing its detector by sending alerts to select forestry officials in its home state of New Mexico and told CNN Business its wildfire detector has spotted about 6,200 total thus far. The company says it can often detect these fires when they're just about 10 acres in size.