Transcript:

Ambience: Brush fire, UAV taking off
Music

Forest fires are often obscured by thick columns of smoke, but now a new instrument gives firefighters a kind of X-ray vision to see right through the smoke. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Vince Ambrosia is a Senior Research Scientist at California State University, Monterrey Bay. He’s developed a sensor, which is carried by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle a UAV. Right now, we’re listening to the sounds of a UAV taking off. It flies over active forest fires, providing crucial information about the intensity and movement of the fire, even when it’s obscured by smoke.

“The UAV and the sensor system can see through any type of smoke column that would obscure the view from the normal human eye from an airborne platform. So, in some cases, we can see through smoke plumes that might be as thick as twenty, twenty-five thousand feet. And we can easily see through that smoke plume -- see the leading edges of the fire, look at where the fire's moving, and look at it relation to the terrain and road networks, stream networks, and other objects like that, that might be obscured either from the ground or from an observer in an aircraft above that fire. Flying over wild land fires is a dangerous mission. And it also can be a dull mission if you're extending your fire data-collection flights for multiple hours. So the capabilities of long-term, high-altitude UAVs, to linger over fires maybe for twenty to twenty-four hours, collecting repeated information over that fire and sending it to the ground, are something currently that a manned aircraft can't do.”

The sensor was first used in the fall of 2006 during the Esperanza fire in southern California. Vince Ambrosia thinks that the system will be put into wider use in the future. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation, with additional support from NASA. I’m Jim Metzner.