WILDFIRESTaming Tomorrow’s Wildfires

Published 22 August 2022

Wildfire has ravaged the Western United States throughout the last decade. Over three million acres have already burned across the country this year. While firefighters battled blazes on the frontlines in 2021, a team of scientists helped from a unique vantage point: outer space.

Wildfire has ravaged the Western United States throughout the last decade. Over three million acres have already burned across the country this year. As fires spark earlier and extend further into autumn each year, turning from “fire seasons” to “fire years,” the National Interagency Fire Center reports that many Western U.S. regions show above-average fire potential.

From predicting big blazes to preventing future fires, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are tackling the problem of increasingly intense wildfires from numerous scientific angles. And they’re keeping our lights on in the process.

Fighting Fires… from Space
While firefighters battled blazes on the frontlines in 2021, a team of scientists helped from a unique vantage point: outer space. PNNL data scientist Andre Coleman leads RADR-Fire, the satellite image processing system that maps active fires. RADR-Fire helps firefighting personnel, utilities operators, and other decisionmakers better understand a fire’s behavior so they can make informed choices in the midst of natural disaster.

But it’s also a planning tool. The same information gathered by the RADR-Fire system can help utility operators assess risk by identifying areas that are most prone to wildfire and which energy infrastructure needs protection. Sensors riding aboard many different satellites—one of them an experimental sensor aboard the International Space Station—grant a sweeping view of Earth’s surface.

Some satellite-based sensors can reveal where fuel is strong, like areas with dry, densely packed vegetation. Others show where vulnerable infrastructure, like transmission lines or generating stations, fall within a fire’s path. Coleman’s team has worked with firefighters to add new capabilities to the system, like the ability to flag where fire retardant drops have landed. As firefighters battle fires on the ground, RADR-Fire provides valuable intel from above. 

Conventional fire mapping techniques involve nighttime aerial imaging aboard firefighting aircraft. Wildfire analysts process images after the aircraft return to base, often drawing the fire’s shifting boundaries by hand based on the aerial imagery. Those maps help firefighting decisionmakers allocate limited resources and strategically manage the fire. But the costly process often takes hours, views can be obscured by thick smoke clouds, and poor weather can ground planes, which often aren’t available when multiple fires demand attention.