Buying time: Inside the AI technology trained on B.C. wildfires

As frontline crews battled the worst wildfire season in B.C. history, a pilot project unfolded at a frantic pace at the BC Wildfire Service headquarters in Kamloops.

As frontline crews battled the worst wildfire season in B.C. history, a pilot project unfolded at a frantic pace at the BC Wildfire Service headquarters in Kamloops. 

Supt. of Predictive Services Neal McLoughlin and his team spent much of 2023 implementing two artificial intelligence programs to analyze the Kamloops and Coastal Fire Centres and do work typically carried out by human analysts: taking data inputs around geographical conditions, weather forecasts, drought conditions, even detailed descriptions of the type of vegetation where new fires were sparking. 

“(When done by people) a typical turn-around time would be anywhere from two to four hours for one fire simulation and you might get 14 in a day,” he said in an exclusive interview with CTV News. “Last year we were running probably 200 fires a day at minimum, and some of those fires would repeat and simulate a second time in a day when a new weather forecast came in.”

That means decision-makers don’t have to wait to assess what equipment and personnel should go where, which can make all the difference when responding to the kind of explosive wildfire growth B.C. saw last year.

As of March, the entire province has been under AI analysis at a time when the fire season has slowed due to cool wet weather in most areas. That’s allowed the team to pay close attention to a smaller number of fires in order to assess how well the parallel programs are predicting what happens when new fires start. 

The Canadian software, FireCast, and American Wildfire Analyst typically provide similar results, but sometimes they provide conflicting forecasts for where and how fast a fire can spread. For the time being they’ll run both systems to compare results.

In recent years, persistent drought conditions and lightning storms have sparked hundreds of wildfires, some of which have destroyed infrastructure and homes.