Well as we've seen over the last few years, wildfires are really impacting our country.

And, we really need to invest in new tools and technology to help better predict those environments.

The Fire Weather Testbed this is a brand new initiative looking to take new tools and technology that help firefighters and meteorologists, and improve them, evaluate them and get them out to the field.

Here on the left is The Next Generation Fire System dashboard.

So we can see right now the latest fire detection was 49 seconds ago in Norman, Oklahoma.

The new tool is called the Next Generation Fire System.

It's a satellite-based fire detection algorithm that helps identify new wildfires.

We can use infrared bands of the satellites that we currently have to detect new wildfires.

We have a geostationary satellite thats looking at wildfires from 22,000 miles away.

And it basically takes a new picture every minute, takes a new scan.

But as a human, I can only look at so much of that information at a time.

And so what this new algorithm does is it helps identify all those new potential wildfires and gives you more information about where they're at and transmit that information to their land management partners.

And then actually to form what they call an Integrated Warning Team, a partnership between the land management agency and the National Weather Service to issue warnings for new wildfires.

Once the National Weather Service gets that information, they can send their partners a message via text just like this.

So if you're a firefighter and you get this information you can go right to it and you can see what the weather is going to be like when you get there.

We've been able to take the time to issue a fire warning from somewhere around an hour-and-a-half down to less than 10 minutes.

Weve seen over the last few years, unfortunately, some really tragic events over last-minute wildfires moving into related areas.

And in the past, there wasn't a good mechanism to issue warnings for those fires.

What we need to do is make sure that we have the right information that gets to people.

We actually had a unique team with three physical scientists with a meteorology background, and then three social scientists.

In order to figure out what the Fire Weather Testbed should be bringing in, should be evaluating, the questions we should be asking, we really need to figure out what the needs in the field are.

One of the challenges here is that every region, every state, every type of jurisdiction, local, state, federal, tribal faces different challenges based on their weather, based on their topography, their resources, and so our role is to identify the needs and gaps, but then also fostering and building relationships with these end users.

I feel theres a lot of need right now for new tools and technology, and so I feel like we really have the opportunity to make some really positive change in society around wildfires.