Event Date
** DUE TO EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES, PROFESSOR DRISCOLL WILL BE GIVING THIS TALK BY ZOOM ONLY. THERE WILL NO LONGER BE AN IN PERSON EVENT. **
Talk by Professor Neal Driscoll from UC San Diego.
This talk will introduce UC San Diego’s ALERTCalifornia program, an early fire confirmation and situational awareness tool that represents the 3rd generation of UC San Diego’s wireless network project. ALERTCalifornia is a network of over 1,000 state-of-the-art Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) fire cameras and associated tools aimed to aid in 3 crucial ways:
1. Before wildfires, assess vegetative fuel load and moisture content to aid forest management decisions;
2. During wildfires, provide real-time data to quickly scale fire resources, help evacuations, and monitor fire behavior; and
3. After wildfires, monitor landscape changes (e.g., soil erosion, debris flows, revegetation) to reduce post-fire hazards.
With the frequency and severity of wildfires in California increasing at an alarming rate over the last decade, remote sensing data have never been more essential to develop effective and time-critical plans for wildfire prevention, protection, mitigation, and response. As a UC San Diego project, ALERTCalifornia is an open-source initiative with its data accessible to all, from first responders to scientists, to tackle wildfires' impact on the environment and climate.
Dr. Neal Driscoll is a geology and geophysics professor at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His work focuses on tectonic deformation and landscape evolution, primarily using sediment records to unveil Earth's history. As the head of UC San Diego's ALERTCalifornia program, he oversees a network of advanced fire cameras aiding early fire confirmation and response. Dr. Driscoll earned his B.S. in Geology from the University of New Hampshire, an M.S. from the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Geophysics at Columbia University.
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