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

rain.aero

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

#131

Post by ted_dunning »

svnt wrote: post #26
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #20

This is great! Sounds like they are solving the problem of detecting tiny fires in vast wilderness[0]. Detection seems like 80% of the problem. Immediate response would be a huge improvement over the current strategy. That's a win even if they don't solve the drone scaling/deployment/automation problems. [0] https://www.rain.aero/missions/software-engineer-realtime-fi...

It looks like a practical use-case for drones even if the dropping of suppressive poke-balls probably needs improvement. Rough numbers: 3 million acres of forest in USA, one drone could ultimately cover 500 sq km (13 km radius) 6000ish drones call it 10k for redundancy Even at 10k per drone including base station that’s roughly $100M in hardware to cover the entirety of US forestland. PG&E is your first customer. edi…

Yellowstone park alone is over 2 million acres. 3 million acres is a wild under-estimate.

You are nearly TWO orders of magnitude off.

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

#132

Post by ted_dunning »

If you look at recent California fires, those with single initiating events occurred under very high wind conditions (> 100kph sustained) which would make drone flight impossible. Besides, such events spread to several acres within minutes of initiation. Dropping a few water balloons will do absolutely nothing.

Other major incidents has enormous numbers of initiating events. Leading up to the CNZ complex, there were over 10,000 lighting strikes in one night in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. These drones would have been completely useless here as well.

The video also claims that a single drone can handle 40 acres. There are over 800 million acres of forest in the US. Buying 20 million drones is one thing, but keeping them flying is pretty much inconceivable given how quickly most toys of this sort quit working under field conditions.

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

#133

Post by EdwardDiego »

anakaine wrote: post #123
Narkov wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The airspace around a bush fire is a particularly hostile environment. This is a good point. Bushfires are also largely caused by high winds that are unpredictable. It makes drones carrying heavy fire retarding payloads a very difficult proposition.

I'm going to qualify this by saying this is specifically in my professional patch. 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…

> 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.

Considering that "wind" is how we describe "air moving", they're not wrong, they're just looking at it from a very different scale to you.

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

#134

Post by allisdust »

ted_dunning wrote: post #132

If you look at recent California fires, those with single initiating events occurred under very high wind conditions (> 100kph sustained) which would make drone flight impossible. Besides, such events spread to several acres within minutes of initiation. Dropping a few water balloons will do absolutely nothing. Other major incidents has enormous numbers of initiating events. Leading up to the CNZ complex, there were…

What we need is a water balloon shooting rail gun. Useful for targeting from distance and can be loaned out to cops for crowd control when not in use.

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

#135

Post by themodelplumber »

ted_dunning wrote: post #132

If you look at recent California fires, those with single initiating events occurred under very high wind conditions (> 100kph sustained) which would make drone flight impossible. Besides, such events spread to several acres within minutes of initiation. Dropping a few water balloons will do absolutely nothing. Other major incidents has enormous numbers of initiating events. Leading up to the CNZ complex, there were…

> those with single initiating events occurred under very high wind conditions (> 100kph sustained)

Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by "single initiating events"...is PG&E negligence or arson counted?

I can name a number of local fires here in rural NorCal that would have been benefitted by drones with this tech. In each case a minimum of 4 aircraft were dispatched after an officer visited the scene. I have to wonder how the situation might be different with a new idea like this. Would it be so bad to keep trying and improving on such concepts?

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

#136

Post by sacrosancty »

rmason wrote: post #3

Conveniently it's a single tree that catches fire with none nearby. Plus the drone is mere minutes away. What if it's densely packed brush and the drone is further away? Or a powerline touches off the fire setting hundreds of trees aflame? Or multiple lightning strikes touches off many fires in a wide area? This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.

> This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.

Can you identify a technology that didn't have that quality initially? Even a simple thing like a pencil - what a waste of money cutting a precision tube inside a stick and somehow installing a carbon rod, which wears out so fast you can't even finish a book without having to build a whole new one. Oh, and it randomly breaks while you're using it and requires special metal sharpening tools.

If it was obviously cheap and reliable from a quick glance, it would have already been invented at a time before it was so obvious!

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

#137

Post by ajmurmann »

mabbo wrote: post #39

The reason we have such terrible fires now is that we keep putting out fires when they're small. Nature builds up too much burnable matter over time. Small fires would burn it in small, localized areas. But if the small fires don't happen then we get the massive fires that destroy towns, cities, and cost lives. I am not impressed by a new way to put out small fires, because that just ensures bigger fires in the long…

I understand that this is true for some forests but not all. Lots of California forests need to burn their underbrush and would do so without human intervention. Out gorge in Oregon is not supposed to do this though.

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

#138

Post by robbedpeter »

robbedpeter wrote: post #119
mabbo wrote: post #39

The reason we have such terrible fires now is that we keep putting out fires when they're small. Nature builds up too much burnable matter over time. Small fires would burn it in small, localized areas. But if the small fires don't happen then we get the massive fires that destroy towns, cities, and cost lives. I am not impressed by a new way to put out small fires, because that just ensures bigger fires in the long…

Use those drones to seed locally appropriate mushroom species with spore sprays. Even better, preemptively identify piles of deadwood and prioritize larger piles. Bonus points if the mushrooms are edible. Double bonus points if they're magic. More mushrooms means more water retention, less fuel that's less dry overall, and a niche in the ecosystem is filled , expanding activity in the adjacent niches, which in turn s…

To clarify, just add spores to the water before deploying, it'll still be just as good in suppressing fires, and it reduces long term buildup. Win/Win!

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

RC_ITR wrote: post #67
lnwlebjel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, this allows you to burn when you want to, such as when conditions are favorable to maintain control of the fire. You're correct that preventing large fires is important - control burns must be part of the solution.

Yeah, we should definitely put out small fires in August and let (or force) bigger ones to burn in March. Wild how little critical thinking gets put behind these meme ideas like 'historic forest management is the only problem and we should let everything burn'.

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by jcrawfordor »

It looks like they're just dropping Elide Fire Balls, an existing fire extinguishing product of limited commercial success. I'd wager due to their high cost, they run something like $100 a piece... As much as a good fire extinguisher. Of course if this worked that could be a significant cost savings compared to sending a crew, but the Fire Balls are intended for enclosed environments and require direct fire exposure to activate... I just can't see it really being a reliable way to extinguish a nascent wildfire.

The video reeks of being a demo thrown together in a weekend. The cuts to debug output are just goofy and the actual fire demo is extremely contrived. The hard part of this, in my mind, is detection... And they don't tell us really anything about how they intend to handle the complex logistics of drones canvassing a substantial forest.

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