The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

Although I agree that better detection may have some value, I have not seen anything from this company (their website or the press they link to) that indicates they actually add anything here.

A story: I was on a crew that was chasing after a series of dry lightening strikes (hundreds of strikes in a night). It was a bad scenario because the weather forecast showed hot, dry, windy weather was coming, so we were in a race against the weather to put out the ignitions. The next morning we chased after the fires, map in hand (showing the location of every lightening strike). We started with the ones in the sketchiest conditions (fuels, terrain, buildings). We put out one after another tiny fire for days. Some were single smoldering trees, some had grown to a few acres. We were lucky to get them all out just before the bad weather arrived. Our limiting factor was not the ability to detect the fires, but the ability to put them out. This is sort of typical of my limited experience. Obviously my experience is small in terms of time and geography. I would however be curious about any research that addresses the value of better detection. It may be that small improvements in detection would help a lot, or it may be insignificant. But the reason for my story is that in my (very limited) experience, detection has not been the problem.

Finally I can't talk about fire suppression without mentioning how tenuous the situation is. On the one hand, the story I told above is one where we prevented a massive fire (given the weather and fuels). But really we just kicked the can down the road. At the end of that story, the conditions were a tinderbox forest in a historically dry and dying forest. Much of the West is in record drought, summers keep getting hotter and drier, wildland-urban interface is getting worse, and fuels keep building up because of beetle kill, our "successes" in fire suppression, etc.

It's not like the fire community doesn't know. This was covered in my training. Everyone in the field knows how it's bad and will only get worse. But the political aspect of this paralyzes progress. Prescribed burns for example: they get shut down because people don't like the smoke and they call their senators. Imagine that. Even if that wasn't a problem, burning is incredibly labor intensive and we more than a century behind. Prescribed burns for a meaningful fraction of Western lands would take an absolutely massive effort and funding. It is skilled and labor intensive work. It's also not risk free. Not that burns will save us. I fear that warming/drying climate likely means the end of forests in much of the US West no matter what we do.

The wind fields around fires are not unpredictable. Landscape scale fires are driven by regional scale winds. Yes, there are some semi-complex interactions between terrain, atmospheric conditions, etc, but these are able to be modelled quickly and effectively. Stating that the winds are unpredictable is actually dangerous.

What is not unusual to see is that front line firefighters will be reporting a wind travelling in toward the front of the fire, and that this completely contradicts what predictive fire behaviour reports suggest. What they are seeing is that the fire is creating a convective updraft which necessitates an indraft that is probably contrary to regional wind direction. The fire will still, largely speaking, progress in the direction that the regional winds push it.

Perhaps your statement could have been improved by suggesting that the wind indraft near a landscape scale fire is both happening at a high speed, but also can have significant eddies induced by the fire, landscape, and vegetation. This would make it very difficult for a drone to remain stable and on course, let along drop ordinance with any accuracy.

There is a further issue of landscape scale. It is completely ridiculous to place these things all over the landscape. They would be much better as a deployable capability when there is a fire going so that new ignitions can be addressed. That said, most places with large bushfires have helicopters deployed with a much higher capacity for extinguishment than the retardant balls.

I find myself asking, as someone who loves new tech developments, "is this just new tech with glossy marketing for the sake of new tech?"

They are on a drone scale (the purpose of my comment) and you've acknowledged this yourself:

> but also can have significant eddies induced by the fire, landscape, and vegetation. This would make it very difficult for a drone to remain stable and on course, let along drop ordinance with any accuracy.

None of this invalidates your argument, but adds IC engines to the list of tech debt. Long unsolved policy problems are usually unsolved for a reason :frown:.