FireMapper 2.0

A forest wildfire is a complex, fast-moving phenomenon and firefighters on the ground often have no way of knowing exactly where the fire front is at any given moment, let alone where it is going. Additionally, wildfires often take place in mountainous terrain, further complicating the task of tracking and studying them. The best perspective on a fire would be from above it... were it not for the smoke and haze obscuring much of the area of interest. Infrared sensors penetrate the smoke and haze but most are easily saturated, so that they cannot usefully differentiate between areas with vastly different temperatures.

FireMapper, a new a set of wildfire and vegetation thermal imaging sensors to aid in firefighting and conservation efforts, overcomes these difficulties and delivers a detailed image that shows the size, strength, and speed of large-scale fires, in real- time. It was developed for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service by Space Instruments Inc. and evolved from previous technology developed by the company for NASA and for the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). An early version of the device flew successfully on NASA's Space Shuttle mission STS-85 in 1997.

Space Instruments — which is headquartered near San Diego, California, and has manufacturing facilities near Fort Collins, Colorado — specializes in infrared and visible spectrum imaging and radiometry. The company provides products and design support to aerospace firms and government agencies in various areas of space instrumentation, including space surveillance, atmospheric sciences, remote sensing, environmental monitoring, and astronomy. It designs and produces its existing sensor product line and also subcontracts to other companies.

Figure 1: Click on image to see enlarged.

The original FireMapper system, which the U.S. Forest Service has been flying for several years, was essentially a beta tester. For the past eight years the Forest Service has been funding Space Instruments to develop FireMapper and FireMapper 2.0 under a research joint venture. Last summer the U.S. Bureau of Land Management flew FireMapper 2.0 for the first time, the production version of the airborne system, designed for government agencies and commercial uses. The new version is smaller, lighter, and simpler to operate than the first one; it is designed more for fire operations rather than research. FireMapper 2.0 is operated remotely from a tablet computer with a touch screen and provides real- time images in either color or gray scale. The device runs almost automatically and does not require a trained operator. At the beginning of each flight line the operator only needs to close the device's door and it calibrates automatically in all three bands. The software operating system also lets the operator freeze any image for later examination. The real time images viewed by the operator are already fully calibrated in terms of temperature and are stamped with GPS time, latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, and track. Zoom capability is also provided. Data can also be recorded directly onto the tablet's drive or onto standard USB drives, which can later be played back on any standard computer.