2019 HPWREN Accomplishments

February 29, 2020

2019 was a busy year for HPWREN. This article highlights significant activities undertaken in 2019 and some predictions for early 2020 activities. We also experienced challenging weather events that complicated our efforts …

I. Awards and grants

• Support from the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), Calit2@UCSD and Calit2@UCI at years end to establish Orange County camera machine learning repository at UCI. A CEPH storage system adding over 500TB to available distributed storage was configured and allocated in December, 2019. Servers were ordered in January, 2020. More details are provided below under the “Research and Development” section.

• Support from SDG&E Resilience Program to

• Improve Resilience of HPWREN connectivity
• Improve Reliability of ASAPNet relay stations
• Provide additional wildfire cameras in SDGE service area in Orange County

• Support from SD County Board of Supervisors for the upgrade of five backbone links and the addition of five new camera sites

II. Public Safety Services and Improvements

HPWREN has added new fire cameras, new wifi capabilities, new fixed wireless links, and various network upgrades to allow for increased bandwidth to our systems from our collaborators. For more specific network upgrade details, see the section below “IT Infrastructure Upgrades, Services and Support”.

• New wildfire camera sites established or upgraded

• Orange County Installations
• Signal Peak - Deployed 4 HPWREN fixed and 2 ALERTSCE PTZ cameras
• Upper Bell - Deployed 4 HPWREN fixed and 2 ALERTSCE PTZ cameras
• Upper Talega - Deployed 4 HPWREN fixed and 2 ALERTSCE PTZ cameras
• San Clemente - Deployed 4 HPWREN fixed and 2 ALERTSDGE PTZ cameras
• Santa Barbara County Installations
• UC Santa Barbara - Deployed 1 ALERTSCE PTZ camera
• Santa Barbara Mesa - Deployed 2 HPWREN fixed and 1 ALERTSCE PTZ cameras
• Los Angeles County Upgrade
• 69Bravo - added a second ALERTSCE PTZ camera
• San Diego County Upgrades
• Boucher Hill - Upgraded 4 HPWREN fixed cameras and added a second ALERTSDGE PTZ camera, all with much better views
• Mount Laguna Observatory - Upgraded 4 HPWREN fixed cameras and added a second ALERTSDGE PTZ camera

• Provided wireless network connectivity for 11 ALERTSCE and 17 ALERTSDGE camera sites

  In support of the growing ALERTWildfire community, HPWREN provides high quality Internet connectivity for ALERTSDG&E and ALERTSCE programs using fixed wide area wireless technology connected to multiple regional Internet gateways at campuses in San Diego and Orange County.

• Added wireless network support for the California State Park Visitor Center at Mt. Palomar Observatory

• Added an 11GHz microwave link between San Clemente Tower and San Onofre State Beach for the California State Parks

• Improved bandwidth to 5 San Diego back county fire stations and one State park site by upgrading the bandwidth to Volcan South radios:

• Shelter Valley Station #53
• Ranchita Station #58
• Julian Station #50
• Julian Station #56
• Ocotillo Wells Station #54
• Ocotillo Wells State Vehicular Recreation Area

III. Public Outreach

The many ways we have reached out to the public this past year include:

• Posted numerous interesting and informative YouTube videos

  See nearly 72 2019 videos (animations, split screens, surround views, etc.) of fires and interesting events captured by HPWREN cameras at https://www.youtube.com/user/hpwren/videos.

• Held its annual HPWREN User Group meeting at Mount Palomar Observatory on April 4, 2019.

• Posted new content on website

  Read more about HPWREN accomplishments, cameras, fire monitoring and even a young future scientist, in 2019 news articles at https://www.hpwren.ucsd.edu/news/index-2019.html.

• Boosted social media presence and increased followings on:

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HPWREN.UCSD.EDU

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/hpwren

  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/hpwren/videos

IV. IT Infrastructure Upgrades, Services and Support

• Development of a custom camera mounting system supporting a single watertight pre-calibrated enclosure for the mounting of two Mobotix cameras



• Added 168TB of storage to production camera image web servers

• Moved the Boucher Hill site to the new CalOES tower

• Moved the Cuyamaca site to a temporary location awaiting new tower completion

• Received permission from CalOES to use their Santiago Peak tower, allowing the establishment of Santiago Peak as an HPWREN radio gateway linking Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties using fixed wireless technologies. This also paves the way for additional HPWREN wireless/CENIC cross county path diversity provided by UCSD, UCI, UCR and SDSU campuses.

• Established a new Mount Laguna Observatory to White Star link to provide telemetry redundancy to the southern part of San Diego county

• Repaired Lyons Peak, replacing failed camera and weather station as well as fixing antenna mounts and cabling issues

• Upgraded antennas and radios on Monument Peak

• Installed a California Parks radio connection to Boucher Hill

• Refreshed backbone equipment at existing sites for routers, switches, power supplies, cabling, UPS etc. (includes some new sites as well):

Boucher Hill	Cuyamaca Peak	Rancho Mission Viejo
Los Pinos	Lyons Peak	Monument Peak
Mount Woodson	North Peak	Red Mountain
San Clemente	Santiago Peak (SCE)	Santiago Peak (CDF)
SDSU	SIO Colo	Sierra Rojo
Signal Peak	Toro Peak	UC Irvine
Volcan South	White Starr	SDSC
Mount Laguna Observatory	Mount Soledad	Mount Palomar Observatory

V. Research and Development

HPWREN is not standing still. Its infrastructure supports a variety of research and education projects and we are always looking for new ways to do things or to add new capabilities. The more significant ones this past year included:

• Continued next generation “getcams” image fetching environment development, including testing with multiple distributed storage options across regions. Investigated potential containerization frameworks. The experimental system runs as a service, spawning and maintaining a single, long running process per camera. We have been able to handle concurrent fetching from 150 cameras once per minute using a single 4 Core 4 GB VM. Image load can now also be spread across multiple servers as needed to support flexible scaling.

• Researchers at UCSD, UCI and UNR are investigating automated fire plume detection using machine learning technologies (see https://www.hpwren.ucsd.edu/news/20190823/). A new getcams installation at UCI (see below) will support these activities for Orange County camera images, while at the same time offering a testbed to demonstrated the utility of the new camera image pipeline.

• PRP (Pacific Research Platform) and Calit2 (at UCSD and UCI) are supporting the establishment of a Calit2@UCI repository for Orange County HPWREN fire camera images in support of machine learning investigations. This Calit2/HPWREN collaborative project was proposed near the end of 2019. This experiment will support

• UCI/OCFA collaboration on fire ignition detection

• Semi-production deployment of HPWRENs next generation image fetching system

• Semi-production deployment of CEPH distributed object storage technologies

• Semi-production deployment of getcams system in distributed image fetch operations

• Orange County cameras fetched, stored and published @UCI
• Other cameras fetched, stored and published @UCSD
• Production usage of NextCloud for camera image exploration, access and bulk download

VI. HPWREN 2019 ticket support system summary

• 593 Jira support tickets completed
• 739 Jira support tickets created
• 103 HPWREN service reports filed for field work

2020 Opportunities

Early 2020 new fire camera site installations are anticipated for

• San Juan Hills
• Green Mountain (LA City)

Developments in future generation of camera fetching technology

• Next generation camera image fetching system developments

  Prototype of next generation camera image fetch system has been tested for all current HPWREN camera types and against CEPH and EdgeFS distributed object storage systems. CEPH is the preferred system and will be used going forward. The new storage system is being prepared for early 2020 deployment at UCI for the role of supporting research access to Orange County camera images.

• Once prototype proof of concept and operational feasibility are confirmed, it will likely be containerized to support replication and scalability.