Transcript:

Ambience: Fire
Music

Aerospace technology is providing a new way to monitor forest fires. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Vince Ambrosia is a Senior Research Scientist at California State University, Monterey Bay. He’s developed an instrument that will give firefighters an instant, accurate image of the temperature, size and location of a forest fire. The instrument, a sensor, flies above the fire, carried by a UAV, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.

“The sensor system that we operate gives the ability to send real-time information from that sensor to a ground receiving station, and then, over the Internet, to a user-community, such as an Incident Fire Command. And to do all that data processing on board the aircraft autonomously in real time or near real time, to basically get the information to the Incident Command Center within about four minutes of it being collected.”

Fire Incident Command Centers are bases set up near forest fires, which oversee and direct firefighting efforts.

“Although the fires are a known entity to the Incident Management Teams, in a lot of cases, because of the severity of the terrain and obscuration by smoke, they don't know where the current fires are really moving, where they're at, what their intensity levels are. And so, they require infrared information to kind of lead their decision-making process and to lead their management teams to make effective decision on the placement of resources, placement of troops to fight the fire, and places to potentially drop fire-retardant from their fire retardant bombers. So, the information that we provide, gives them a bird's-eye view: current conditions of where the fire really is at that moment in time, rather than waiting for other intelligence assets, to tell them maybe two or three or four hours later where the fire has been.”

Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation, with additional support from NASA.