LA Times Today: New desalination technology being tested in California could lower costs of tapping seawater
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Los Angeles Times
17 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
In high-tech race to detect fires early, O.C. bets on volunteers with binoculars
As California turns to satellite imagery, remote cameras watched by AI and heat detection sensors placed throughout wildlands to detect fires earlier, one Orange County group is keeping it old-school. Whenever the National Weather Service issues a red flag warning, a sign that dangerous fire weather is imminent, Renalynn Funtanilla swiftly sends alerts to her more than 300 volunteers' phones and inboxes. She wheels TVs into a conference room turned makeshift command center, sets up computers and phones around the table and dispatches volunteers to dozens of trailheads and roadways in Orange County's wildland-urban interface: likely spots for the county's next devastating fire to erupt. The volunteers — sporting bright yellow vests and navy blue hats with an 'Orange County Fire Watch' emblem — slap large fire watch magnets to the sides of their vehicles, grab some binoculars and start to watch. Amid California's coastal sage scrub and chaparral ecosystems that are plagued with frequent fast-moving fires, preventing ignitions and stamping out fires before they become unmanageable is the name of the game. To do it, Orange County Fire Watch is betting on good Samaritans teaching the public how to prevent ignitions and keeping an eye out for potential culprits, from overheating e-bikes to arsonists. (In Orange County, human-operated equipment has historically been responsible for about 34% of wildfires documented by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, while arsonists have started about 15%.) Despite the program's simplicity, fire experts say this system might be one of our best shots at stifling coastal California's wildfire problem. 'When you have so-called 'red flag days,' that is the time to put the effort into monitoring for ignitions,' said Alexandra Syphard, who studies fire in chaparral ecosystems and causes of ignitions. 'The fact that you have these volunteers doing that — it is exactly what I would recommend.' The modern-day tale of fire in California often goes something like this: Through centuries of fire suppression, the state's wildlands have built up a dangerous level of thick, flammable vegetation, requiring us to introduce more frequent, less intense controlled burns and forest thinning to limit the severity of major fires. While true for the Sierra Nevadas, much of coastal California has the opposite problem. Despite the state's best efforts to suppress fire, the number of ignitions has become increasingly frequent in the region as Californians continued to build into the wildlands and create more opportunities for sparks. Hundreds of years ago, lightning started virtually every fire in the coastal Southern California. It now accounts for fewer than 5%, with humans responsible for the rest. These blazes take off in part because native plants in the chaparral and sage scrub ecosystems are getting choked out by such frequent fire. Fast-growing and flammable invasive brush has been more than happy to take their spot. During red flag days, where dry conditions give fire an optimal fuel and intense winds can transport embers miles away, controlling vicious blazes becomes incredibly difficult. Attempts to contain the blaze are often quickly thwarted by new spot fires caused by burning embers. Once a fire starts devouring homes — an extremely dense and powerful fuel source for fires — it becomes borderline impossible for fire crews to contain. In these conditions, 'there is not a lot that can be done,' said Jeff Shelton, a California wildfire behavior consultant. So, many experts argue preventing disaster requires stopping fires before they start — or catching them in the earliest phases. In the worst conditions, fires can grow exponentially, meaning a nascent fire going unnoticed for just a few minutes could mean the difference between a close call and the loss of homes and lives. All of Orange County Fire Watch's sentinels started as volunteers with the county parks or the Irvine Ranch Conservancy, which boast pools of 1,200 and 500 volunteers, respectively. That existing network of community service-focused nature lovers has helped Orange County Fire Watch become one of the largest programs of its kind in California. To earn their coveted hats and yellow vests, each volunteer goes through first aid and public engagement training, followed by a four-hour crash course covering fire behavior, common dangerous and suspicious activities and local emergency response. It gives them everything they need to quickly and confidently identify fires, discern their exact location and effectively alert the Orange County Fire Authority (which gives the program its full blessings). For Phil Sallaway, it's a way to do his part in addressing a problem that can often feel insurmountable. 'It contributes to the community in a very positive way,' he said. 'I'm retired, so I didn't want to just sit around home or be that guy in the coffee shop just drinking coffee and complaining,' he joked. Throughout Orange County Fire Watch's ten years serving the region, there's been no shortage of high-tech attempts to address the problem. In 2023, Cal Fire partnered with UC San Diego to bring artificial intelligence to the university's more than 1,100 remote cameras strategically placed throughout the state to monitor for fires. In 2024, it detected over 1,600 fires, beating 911 calls nearly four out of 10 times. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched the latest of its GOES satellites in 2024, which scan the Earth every 10 minutes for fires and other extreme weather events. In July, the Google- and Cal Fire-backed Earth Fire Alliance unveiled the first images from a prototype satellite for its FireSat constellation that will scan fire-prone regions every 20 minutes with significantly better resolution. The Irvine Ranch Conservancy, which houses the fire watch program, has even partnered with a high school student who designed a network of sensors capable of detecting the heat and smoke of new fire starts. But both cameras and satellites lack one key piece of Orange County Fire Watch's mission: ignition prevention. The volunteers' typical two-hour shifts also entail telling hikers not to light a cigarette on trail, flagging down cars accidentally sparking on the road and, hopefully, deterring arsonists. Computers, sensors and AI 'can't talk to the public and say, 'Hey, did you know about these red flag warning conditions?'' said Funtanilla, program coordinator for Orange County Fire Watch. 'There's definitely value to that human touch of having a person stationed with this yellow vest that someone from the public can actually ask questions.' Yet, measuring the success of fire watch programs is not easy, Syphard said. Researchers could start by counting the number of potential ignitions avoided — like when an Orange County Fire Watch volunteer caught a car with a damaged wheel rim creating sparks on the road — but that wouldn't account for the effect of deterrence. Eventually, researchers could look at Orange County Fire Watch's footprint and see if the total number of ignitions declined when the group was activated (while also accounting for all the other factors influencing ignitions), but such a study has yet to be done. Regardless, fire experts see the approach as a cost-effective and promising way to address coastal California's fire doom spiral by cutting the cycle off at its start. 'This type of program should be scaled up at the same time that the technology is scaled up,' Shelton said. 'I would define it as indispensable.'
The Hill
30-07-2025
- The Hill
California study finds ER visits spiking with heat, but overall deaths falling from lack of cold
Californians are poised to become sicker in a future marked by climate-fueled warming, but they may also be less likely to die from temperature-related events as extreme cold days become rarer, a new study has found. Emergency room visits in California increased in a linear fashion as daily temperatures escalated over the course of a recent decade, from 2006 to 2017, according to the study, published on Wednesday in Science Advances. But neither hospital admissions or related-death exhibited the same unbending climb. Although extreme heat and extreme cold alike cause more people to die, illness rates tend to increase as the weather becomes hotter, and they tend to be lower in colder conditions, the study authors explained. In other words: Emergency visits are still likely to surge as the planet warms, but temperature-related deaths as a whole may decline thanks to the ongoing disappearance of extreme cold days. The researchers — led by Carlos Gould at the University of California San Diego — analyzed 123 million zip code-level emergency department visits, 45 million such hospital admissions and 2.9 million county-level death records between 2006 and 2017. They also compiled daily temperature records from 1,500 zip codes in 56 California counties for the same period. Over time, they observed that the zip codes experienced an increase in emergency room visits: from an average of 1,936 per 100,000 people every month to 2,531 in 2017. During the same window, both hospitalization rates and deaths showed a U-curve for temperature — exhibiting unsurprising increases during extreme cold and hot periods. The scientists calculated an increase in emergency department visits California due to changes in temperatures by 2050 — an additional 0.46 percent, or 1.5 million excess visits, in comparison to today. At that point, related hospitalizations and deaths will both likely decline, by 0.18 percent and 0.43 percent, respectively, or 244,000 fewer hospitalizations and 53,500 fewer deaths, according to the study. By 2100, the researchers projected a 0.76 percent increase in emergency department visits, a 0.38 percent decline in hospital admissions and a 0.77 plunge in deaths due to temperature changes. As far as economics are concerned, the scientists calculated that by 2050, emergency room visits would cost California an additional $52 million, while temperature-related death costs would decrease by $30 billion and hospitalization costs by $53 million. Going forward, the researchers called for further analysis into the morbidity and mortality — illness and death — impacts of temperature variation within populations, noting that specific effects may differ considerably among age groups. 'A very broad range of morbidity outcomes will likely be affected by a warming climate and that future increases in heat extremes will increase both morbidity and mortality,' the authors stated. And with a much warmer future likely ahead, the researchers questioned just how long the decreases in death related to cold could truly outweigh the increases related to excessive warmth. 'Our results suggest that beneficial impact of declining cold extremes for mortality — an expected substantial benefit of climate change in much of the world — will be offset, at least partially, by increases in morbidity at those temperatures,' they added.
Yahoo
21-07-2025
- Yahoo
SpaceX rocket to propel 2 NASA satellites into orbit: What to know about TRACERS mission
The next satellites SpaceX helps to deliver to orbit from Southern California won't be its own, but rather two of NASA's. Spaceflight missions to deploy internet-beaming Starlink satellites are by far the most common at the Vandenberg Space Force Base. But up next, the commercial spaceflight company founded by billionaire Elon Musk will instead help launch into orbit twin satellites on a scientific mission for the U.S. space agency. The probes, which are central to NASA's TRACERS mission, will then observe how energy from the sun's atmosphere flows through Earth's magnetosphere – the region around Earth dominated by our planet's magnetic field. California rocket launches: Why not all Californians are happy that SpaceX rocket launches have increased As with any launch from Vandenberg, plenty of spots around Southern California should offer a decent view of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket climbing into the sky. But for those who want to know a little bit more about the mission the spacecraft is helping reach orbit, here's everything to know about NASA's TRACERS mission. What is NASA's TRACERS mission? Twin satellites to study solar activity Earth's magnetosphere protects our planet from being constantly bombarded by solar wind. Powerful enough to breach the magnetosphere in explosive events known as "magnetic reconnection," solar wind can disrupt satellites, GPS signals and other technologies, and even trigger some stunning auroras in the northern hemisphere. To better understand the phenomenon, NASA plans to place twin satellites – built by Boeing subsidiary Millennium Space Systems – into a sun-synchronous orbit, meaning they match Earth's rotation around the sun. The spacecraft are designed to follow one another in tandem while observing thousands of reconnection events and how the process changes and evolves. The mission is known as TRACERS, a lengthy acronym that stands for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites. The satellites will fly at a trajectory known as low-Earth orbit – an altitude that allows for things like satellites to circle Earth fairly quickly. In this case, the satellites will travel through the funnel-shaped holes in the magnetic field known as polar cusp that open over the north and south poles. NASA even plans to combine and compare data from other solar-observing missions, including NASA's PUNCH mission that got off the ground in March. By observing this process, scientists will be able to learn more about and prepare for technological disruptions on Earth resulting from solar activity, according to NASA. SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch NASA TRACERS twin satellites: When is liftoff from California? SpaceX will serve as the launch service provider for the NASA mission, which will get off the ground from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California. The company, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, will use its two-stage 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket, one of the world's most active, to launch the satellites into orbit. A Federal Aviation Administration operations plan advisory indicates the launch is being targeted for Tuesday, July 22, with backup opportunities available the following day, if needed. The launch window opens at 11:13 a.m. PT, according to NASA. What is the Vandenberg Space Force Base? The Vandenberg Space Force Base is a rocket launch site in Santa Barbara County in Southern California. Established in 1941, the site was previously known as the Vandenberg Air Force Base. Though it's a military base, the site also hosts both civil and commercial space launches for entities like NASA and SpaceX. Space Launch Delta 30, a unit of Space Force, is responsible for managing the launch operations at Vandenberg, as well as the missile tests that take place at the base. Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: What is NASA's TRACERS mission? 2 satellites to launch from Vandenberg Solve the daily Crossword
