With wildfire season coming soon, NASA researchers are attempting to give firefighters additional safety measures through low-cost thermal sensors that are installed on fire bulldozers.
These sensors alert firefighters to when heat from nearby wildfires reach dangerous levels. Additionally, the sensor provides data on what happens beneath the canopy during a fire.
This two-front sensor goal is a collaboration between NASA and the Alabama Forestry Commission (AFC).
“As we try to develop technologies that allow us to understand and respond to wildfires with our partners, ground observations are vital to provide context for what we are seeing from space,” said Ian Brosnan, program manager for wildland fires at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
How it works
Bulldozers, also known as fire dozers in the field, are used at the front line of a fire to clear vegetation and create fire breaks. This puts operators within feet of the flames. To help with safety, the AFC switched its bulldozers to closed “envirocabs” that are safer for operators than traditional open cabs of bulldozers. The only problem is that these envirocabs make it harder to gauge when radiant heat from the fire has reached dangerous levels.
“It’s not so much about what’s going to burn the tractor up as what’s going to shut the tractor down,” said Ethan Barrett, AFC fire analyst. The electrical wiring can short or even melt from high heat, stranding the operator in a dangerous environment.
The thermal sensors developed by NASA are commercial off-the-shelf electronic components with a thermocouple that sits in the window to measure temperature. It is the same sensor that is used in an oven or a kiln.
The thermocouple is wired to an LED light attached to the dashboard that’s in the line of sight of the operator. When temperatures reach unsafe levels, the LED starts blinking. The whole system is powered by AA batteries, NASA said.
“While installing the second sensor, we realized we needed an extra piece, so we just ran out to the local hardware store to grab it,” said Ryan Wade, research scientist with the University of Alabama, Huntsville and NASA FireSense. “NASA’s expertise in this case comes not in the novelty of the instrument itself, but in figuring out how to solve the problem quickly and integrate that technology into their existing system.”
Data collected
Since the installation on the fire dozers, the sensors have been used on wildfires and prescribed burns where they worked as intended, NASA said.
It was able to give the fire dozer operators more situational awareness and provide data on the canopy under the fire.
The next steps will be for NASA FireSense and the AFC to integrate the Fire Thermal InfraRed Spectrometer (FireTIRS) to measure temperature, spread rate, flame length, fire convection and gas emissions.
The organizations are also looking at anemometers and compact cameras for the fire dozers to provide data on wind speed and direction as well as provide data on the burn severity, rate of spread and the type, volume and consumption of fuels.
“This is the dataset that will get us to the next generation of fire models,” said Jennifer Fowler, science integration manager for the wildland fires program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “It gives us the detailed understanding we need to create tools that can give firefighters more advanced notice of what a fire will do. On a wildfire, that extra time is everything.”
