Climate change has ratcheted up the risk of explosive wildfire growth in California by 25% and will continue to drive extreme fire behavior for decades to come, even if planet-warming emissions are reduced, a new study has found. "Emissions reductions have a minimal impact on wildfire danger in the near term -- the next several decades," said author Patrick T. Brown, co-director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute, a Berkeley-based think tank. "So it's important to look at more direct on-the-ground solutions to the problem like fuel reduction." Although previous studies have looked at the impact of climate change on broader metrics like annual area burned, as well on conditions that are conducive to wildfires, like aridity, the research published Wednesday in Nature drills down on how rising temperatures affected individual fires, and how they might continue to do so in the future. The researchers analyzed nearly 18,000 fires that ignited in California between 2003 and 2020.

Abstract-- Small unmanned aircraft can help firefighters combat wildfires by providing real-time surveillance of the growing fires. However, guiding the aircraft autonomously given only wildfire images is a challenging problem. This work models noisy images obtained from on-board cameras and proposes two approaches to filtering the wildfire images. The first approach uses a simple Kalman filter to reduce noise and update a belief map in observed areas. The second approach uses a particle filter to predict wildfire growth and uses observations to estimate uncertainties relating to wildfire expansion. The belief maps are used to train a deep reinforcement learning controller, which learns a policy to navigate the aircraft to survey the wildfire while avoiding flight directly over the fire. Simulation results show that the proposed controllers precisely guide the aircraft and accurately estimate wildfire growth, and a study of observation noise demonstrates the robustness of the particle filter approach.