Satellite observation can inform firefighting on the ground. The Camp Fire in northern California on November 8, 2018. Photo / Nasa Earth Observatory, Joshua Stevens
As the Fish Creek Fire burned through thousands of hectares in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, the team in charge of managing the blaze put in a request: Could the government send a plane to fly over and map the activity?
It was last August and much of the United States West was on fire.
The request was denied due to a lack of resources, said a spokesperson for the National Interagency Fire Centre.
Anthony Schultz, a firefighter embedded on the blaze who works for a mapping software company when he’s not in the field, knew all too well the potential for things to be different.
If there were a way to get frequent and precise updates on the activity via satellite, without the reliance on often-strapped government resources, “we’d have a real chance to fight fire differently”, he said.
Schultz’s hope is part of a growing recognition among both firefighters, technology companies and the US government that there needs to be advancements in tracking and extinguishing increasingly dangerous blazes.
Part of the focus is on the atmosphere, where private enterprises are launching satellites into space that could more accurately detect fires, signalling an investment in monitoring a form of extreme weather that has not historically received as much attention.
“In comparison to hurricanes, our fire models are not as good,” said Jessica McCarty, an earth scientist at Nasa who studies wildfire.
“We haven’t spent as long or as much money investing in how to improve fire modelling.”
Aerial tracking of fires from space isn’t new, but as it exists, there are limitations, either in how precise the images are or how often they are taken.
A few satellites detected the Eaton fire that devastated Altadena, California. The detections were helpful, officials said, but had shortcomings including low resolution and potential gaps between when the imagery was recorded.
One of the country’s most real-time methods of tracking fires, known as FireGuard, uses information from military satellites, cleansed of classified material by members of the National Guard, who then create an approximate map of the fire.
That works well enough, said Schultz, the director of Wildland Fire Solutions at Esri, which develops digital maps. But it involves a bit of red tape and it doesn’t pick up every fire in the US.
“We don’t have a scalable, repeatable way where agencies can just go to a single marketplace and request fire imagery,” he added.
Some private companies are trying to change that, part of a fresh influx of start-up ventures focused on fire.
More than 100 new wildfire-related technologies have launched in the US and around the world since 2023, according to Lori Moore-Merrell, who served as US fire administrator during the Biden Administration.
“Out of necessity comes innovation,” Moore-Merrell said. “We’re seeing fast fires and they’re hitting communities more often.”
Unmanned lookout poles that use AI to sense smoke have been erected in the West.
Swarms of military-grade drones are increasingly used for wildfire detection and management.
AI technology also tracks lightning strikes, which can ignite wildfires.
They contribute to an arsenal of weapons fighting a natural enemy that’s only getting more severe and destructive.
“It is warfare,” said Dan Hart, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “You have an adversary that you detect and that is moving, and you have to figure out how to engage that adversary.”
As America contends with what is already a punishing year of wildfires across massive swathes of the country, new, extremely precise satellite images beamed from space from the initiative FireSat signalled the potential of a new era of private industry trying to detect and record increasingly catastrophic blazes.
In March, a satellite outfitted with infrared sensors was launched more than 600km into space with the sole task of detecting and monitoring fires.
With the ability to loop millions of kilometres around the planet each day, it found active fires and burn scars using bands of infrared light, demonstrating technology that the project’s leaders and its early adopters said could be integral to filling technological gaps in the way they fight burns.
The satellite initiative was launched by a non-profit coalition called Earth Fire Alliance (EFA).
Its partners include: Muon Space, which is developing the satellites; Google, which is using AI to help filter through the images; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; and the Environmental Defence Fund.
The goal is to have 50 satellites in orbit by 2030 to capture the entire world.
At full capacity, the constellation is aiming to sweep the entire Earth every 20 minutes to detect small fires. By spring or summer of next year, it plans to launch three more satellites into space that will co-ordinate with agencies in states including California and Colorado to help them detect and fight fire.
“These satellites from EFA are going to exponentially increase our situational awareness of where the fire perimeter is,” said Phillip SeLegue, the staff chief of Cal Fire’s intelligence programme.
The images released last week included one of a small June 23 fire outside of Medford, Oregon, that no other space-based systems picked up, said Brian Collins, the executive director of the EFA.
It occurred on the side of the road and was spotted by people on the ground but had the potential to expand if undetected. “If this had occurred in any large, remote area, this fire could smoulder and move around ... and nobody would notice,” he said.
Sean Triplett, who worked as a wildfire fighter in Alaska, said teams in the region used to fly over the state’s remote terrain after lightning storms, just to see if any concerning fires had sparked.
Now EFA’s data integration and operations lead, Triplett sees value in getting that early detection without the effort of a plane ride.
The satellites would also gather data on active fires that could be essential for those fighting them on the ground.
Currently, monitoring lacks the ability to measure in real time how fast a fire is burning and how hot the fire is, he said.
With FireSat, first responders in the field would receive updates in 20-minute intervals on where an active fire is spotted through phones, tablets or laptops that could help them make decisions about where they should deploy, SeLegue said.
The data on the blazes’ intensities would also help improve future fire modelling, he added. “This has been a gap for all of us for a very long time.”
Another image showed a blaze near Petawanga Lake in northwest Ontario, Canada, on June 15 that included an active fire, how heat had built up and where the land was warming faster because of a lack of vegetation from past fires.
If a blaze is hot and moving quickly, people on the ground should know that, Collins said.
The technological advancements on firefighting are necessary and show promise but implementing them across the country is a different story, said Dan Munsey, fire chief of the San Bernardino County Fire Protection District.
“We don’t have a wildfire technology crisis, we have a wildfire technology adoption crisis,” he said.
“This tech exists but when we adopt it it’s really siloed or we’re not adopting it at all.”
The US Government is pushing for change.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in June that called for technological advancements in fighting and detecting wildfires. Bipartisan legislation in the Senate has also called for prioritising and streamlining emerging technologies on wildfire.
“Wildfire has unfortunately been seen as just a California problem or just a Colorado problem when really it’s a whole country problem,” McCarty said.
That perception has shifted in around the last 10 years with attention on blazes in places including New Jersey, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
“We need to catch up,” she said, “quickly.”