- Tue 15 February 2022
- Capstone
- #capstone, #students, #university, #research, #university of idaho, #wildfire, #infrasound
Wildfire, water-shortages, weird-weather; all sounds like some dystopian sci-fi novel, right?
Scary that some of that is appearing across the United States, isn't it?
Yeah. Now, weather you're a "climate change subscriber," or not, I think there's a lot to be said about the challenges the world faces. If for nothing else, we've got to figure out where to get all that water from, and we need to figure out what we're going to do to help face the challenges of wildfire in our increasingly populous world.
I've written in the past about some of the project work that I'm sponsoring at the University of Idaho, and I wanted to highlight that briefly while also pointing out some interesting things popping up from around the world.
What's Happening with Water?
I really don't have much to say here, but I did want to highlight an article that shows some of the drama of the water shortages that are appearing across the American Southwest.
Read the article (archived in my personal archive server)
Makes me wish there were other ways I could get involved in researching additional technology in this area.
What's New
photo credit: Luke Woods - student research team
This year is my second year acting as the sponsor for a wildfire detection system, and I have to say, I'm stoked. This is a very exciting project, and has a lot of potential. If you want to read more about the concept or tech, go check out my articles on finding fire and making it, hearing fires while seeing smoke, or detecting fires with sound.
What's new and exciting right now, is the team's approach, using inspiration from Mother Nature. They're using some designs for their drop-payload which were inspired by a Samara leaf so they can make the payload drop in a safe, and controlled fashion. Now, this isn't exactly a novel idea, there's a few others who have done similar things:
Still, this is brand new to us, and so far as I'm aware, it's a new way to drop materials as a deployment technique. I'm very proud of the team's work, and I'm so excited to see where they'll take this project!
Hopefully, I'll be keeping more updates coming; but let's be honest, I'm in charge of the updates, so they might be a bit sparse, or even a bit all-over-the-place.