Satellite technology will make firefighting easier

$170M system will let firefighters make instant decisions

Canada’s fire managers will be able to — eventually — count on some help from above in battling the country’s ever more severe forest fires.

But that help won’t be coming until 2029, when Canada launches its first-ever constellation of satellites dedicated to wildfire detection and observation.

When launched, the $170 million project — dubbed WildFireSat — will enable firefighters on the ground to make near-real time decisions on battling blazes based on data coming from a set of satellites orbiting overhead.

The goal, said Josh Johnston, primary investigator for the WildFireSat project and a forest fire research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, is to observe what fires are doing, and get that information to the people fighting those fires as soon as possible. The target is for wildfire managers to have useful data in hand within 30 minutes of it being captured by the satellites.

“This is the very first time ever that a country is producing a dedicated fire monitoring satellite, an operational one,” he said. “There have been scientific missions that have gone out, but they could only do a small amount of work. We’re talking about an operational system that is dedicated to supporting fire managers. It’s never been done.”

“It’s not just a satellite, it is end to end. It’s the space, it’s the antennas to bring it to the ground. It’s the data processing. It’s all of the scientific maturation that comes behind the products, the operationalization of it. But beyond all of that, it’s also the knowledge exchange and end user readiness.”

Not only will fire managers be able to make more informed decisions on potential evacuations, best use of their resources and prioritizing where and when to fight fires, but the data from the WildFireSat constellation will also allow analysts more precise information on smoke released by those fires, leading to more accurate air quality forecasts during a wildfire season.

The satellites will also be tasked with measuring carbon emitted by fires, required by international agreements on carbon reporting.

A large chunk of that information is already available through existing satellites, but those are general purpose scientific satellites, said Johnston, not designed explicitly to fight fires and that creates a few major problems with the data available from them.

Chief among those problems is the fact the orbits of existing satellites do not take them over Canada during the times most crucial to firefighting efforts.

That time — the “peak burn period” — is generally between about 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. At those times wildfires tend to be at their most active. Higher temperatures, stronger winds and generally low humidity in that period contribute to the rapid spread of fires.

But with existing satellites — including NASA’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite and its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite — there’s a coverage gap over Canada at that time.

WildFireSat aims to plug that gap. The constellation will adopt an idealized orbit that allows the satellites — at least three of them, possibly more — to pass over any given point in Canada at about the same time each day.

One other benefit is that WildFireSat would theoretically improve both the efficiency and the safety of current wildfire surveillance.

To fill in the reconnaissance gaps left by today’s satellite orbits, firefighting teams often use planes, helicopters and drones to keep an eye on fires. That’s problematic in two ways. One, because those aircraft travel at relatively low altitudes, they may take a long time to build up a picture of a particularly large fire. And two, the flying of planes and helicopters over a large fire is a dangerous business.

WildFireSat can kill both of those birds with one stone. First, because of its orbit at a much higher altitude, it will be able to observe a much greater swath of land at one pass than a plane or helicopter. And because it will provide the data that fire managers need when they need it, it will eliminate or severely reduce the need for putting pilots in dangerous situations around fires.

The current satellites from which fire managers pull their data are general-purpose scientific satellites, said Johnston. Building WildFireSat, from the ground up as a dedicated firefighting platform also means they are able to tailor its satellites’ cameras specifically to observing wildfires.

While the configuration of the satellites has yet to be decided, one criteria is for WildFireSat cameras to be able to observe the ground below not just in visible light wavelengths, but in specific infrared wavelengths chosen to produce, when combined, the most complete picture of Canada’s wildfires. Infrared wavelengths are vital to the data collected, because, unlike visible light wavelengths, they are able to penetrate the smoke cover from a fire.

And at the heart of WildFireSat’s observation package is an extraordinary piece of equipment — an infrared camera that does not need to be cooled.

Traditionally, satellite infrared cameras have required bulky, power-hungry cooling systems to bring the camera’s temperature to the point where it’s most effective. On the James Webb Space Telescope — another order of magnitude in terms of precision, size and expense — it took almost three weeks to cool the instruments down to -266 degrees Celsius once the telescope was in orbit.

The uncooled infrared camera does away with that bulk, meaning satellites can be made smaller — and much less expensive to launch — and less power-hungry. Johnston said the new infrared camera can run on the same power it takes to run a Christmas light bulb.

When it’s in orbit, what that camera is looking for is a measure of Fire Radiative Power, a measure of the energy of the flames on the ground, said Miriam Micael, an engineer in Project Management, Space Utilization at the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which will operate the satellite once its launched.

The CSA has contracted with three companies to design the particulars of WildFireSat.

While WildFireSat, is still in early planning stages, Micael said she expects that in about a year, one of those three companies will be targeted to build the system. WildFireSat is targeted for a proposed 2029 launch on a mission that is scheduled to last five years.