Fighting Wildfire With Satellites, Lasers, and Drones

Fire lookout technology has changed a lot since Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. The book was taken almost entirely from a diary Kerouac kept when he was fire lookout for 63 days on Desolation Peak in Washington. Now, satellite images, fuel analysis, and, soon, the use of drones, are among the high-tech methods for protecting wilderness and civilization from wildfires. Some of the more important real-time fire data comes from MODIS, a sensor on two NASA satellites that view the entire earth’s surface every one to two days. The sensors show heat sources (that’s how a fire was first spotted in Noatak, Alaska by a fire manager looking at the data in the early 2000s). It was the first time a fire had been detected by satellite before humans noticed it, says Sean Triplett, the group leader for geo-spatial and information management at the U.S. Forest Service. After a fire, the U.S. Geological Survey’s LANDSAT satellite can be used to determine the severity of the burn by comparing a pre-fire photo of an area to a post-fire one. The differences in brightness allow scientists to determine the normalized burn ratio, as well as to reflect the changes on the ground. While airplanes are used to get aerial views now, they may soon be supplemented with drones, Triplett said. Once the FAA approves their use, unmanned aerial vehicles may give scientists, firefighters, and those interested in preserving national resources more information on areas that have high fire potential—so, for instance, parts of southern California during Santa Ana winds...more