The problem
The invisible threats of wildfires have caused grave damages to humanity and the environment. Check out the animated slides below to see how.
What is an ember attack?
An ember attack occurs when a wildfire generates thousands of burning fragments (firebrands) that become airborne and travel far beyond the main fire front. Intense wildfires create powerful updrafts that lift burning materials—from leaves to branches—high into the atmosphere, where winds can carry them up to 15 kilometers away. These embers effectively "jump" over firebreaks, roads, and rivers that would normally stop ground-based fire spread, with each ember potentially igniting a new spot fire when it lands on receptive fuel like dry vegetation or building materials.
Why are ember attacks so deadly?
Ember attacks are deadly due to their invisibility, unpredictability, and ability to bypass conventional defenses. While the main fire front is visible, embers travel through invisible air currents, often undetected until they've already ignited new fires, with many small enough to evade standard detection yet still capable of starting new blazes. Their movement follows chaotic fluid dynamics governed by complex interactions between atmospheric turbulence, thermal gradients, topography, and the aerodynamics of each ember, creating unpredictable dispersal patterns that defy even advanced computational models. Traditional containment strategies like firebreaks become ineffective as embers easily travel 5-10 kilometers through the air, creating a three-dimensional fire propagation problem that results in approximately 70% of structure ignitions during wildfire events.
Why can't existing solutions fix the problem?
Current wildfire monitoring systems (satellites, watchtowers, cameras, patrol teams) fail against ember attacks because they rely primarily on visual observation, which becomes useless when thick smoke reduces visibility to near zero. These visual systems cannot detect or measure the critical physical parameters—wind fields, thermal gradients, atmospheric turbulence—that govern ember transport, leaving the invisible air currents that carry embers completely unmonitored. Even advanced computational models like Google's 2022 Tubbs fire simulation require supercomputing resources and days of processing time, far too slow for emergency response, which is why FireAIDSS represents a paradigm shift by deploying sensors directly into three-dimensional space to collect real-time measurements of physical parameters and predict ember transport patterns within minutes.