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.
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.
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. 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.
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. While the configuration of the satellites has yet to be decided, one of the 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.
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