Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “fire smoke”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 37 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2015

Laser Imaging Video Camera Sees Through Fire, Fog, Smoke

Under a series of SBIR contracts with Langley Research Center, inventor Richard Billmers refined a prototype for a laser imaging camera capable of seeing through fire, fog, smoke, and other obscurants. Now, Canton, Ohio-based Laser Imaging through Obscurants (LITO) Technologies Inc. is demonstrating the technology as a perimeter security system at Glenn Research Center and planning its future use in aviation, shipping, emergency response, and other fields.

Source record↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Advancing Wildfire Monitoring with TEMPO and ML tools: Hourly Smoke and Fire‑Front Mapping and Near‑Surface NO₂ Predictions

Wildfires impose substantial impacts on communities and regions downwind of wildfire smoke. We present a TEMPO‑enabled workflow that generates value‑added Level‑3 smoke‑plume masks and fire‑front maps for large wildfires, such as 2024 Park Fire, using the self‑supervised deep learning system SIT‑FUSE, along with near‑surface NO₂ predictions produced by a foundation model (Microsoft Aurora). We conclude by outlining a roadmap for expanding these capabilities to additional Western U.S. wildfire events and for delivering actionable tools to stakeholders. This open-source, reproducible workflow provides a scalable framework for cross-agency wildfire monitoring to overcome traditional limitations in smoke-cloud discrimination and air-quality forecasting by incorporating TEMPO data and beyond.

Xiaohua Pan↗
NASA NTRS2001

SMOKE: Characterization of Smoke Particulate for Spacecraft Fire Detection

'Smoke' is a flight definition investigation whose purpose is to characterize the smoke particulate from microgravity smoke sources to enable improved design of future space-craft smoke detectors. In the earliest missions (Mercury, Gemini and Apollo), the crew quarters were so cramped that it was considered reasonable that the astronauts would rapidly detect any fire. The Skylab module, however, included approximately 30 UV-sensing fire detectors. The Space Shuttle Orbiter has nine particle-ionization smoke detectors in the mid-deck and flight deck. The detectors for the US segments of the International Space Station (ISS) are laser-diode, forward-scattering, smoke detectors. Current plans for the ISS call for two detectors in the open area of the module, and detectors in racks that have cooling air-flow. Due to the complete absence of microgravity data, all three of these detector systems were designed based upon 1-g test data and experience. As planned mission durations and complexity increase and the volume of spacecraft increases, the need for and importance of effective, crew-independent, fire detection will grow significantly, necessitating more research into microgravity fire phenomena. In 1997 the Comparative Soot Diagnostics Experiment (CSD) flew in the Orbiter Middeck as a Glovebox payload. The CSD experiment was designed to produce small quantities of smoke from several sources to obtain particulate samples and to determine the response of the ISS and Orbiter smoke detectors to these sources. Marked differences in the performance of the detectors compared to their behavior in 1-g were observed. In extreme cases, the detector used in the orbiter was completely blind to easily visible smoke from sources that were readily detected in 1-g. It is hypothesized but as yet unverified that this performance difference was due to enhanced growth of liquid smoke droplets in low-g. These CSD results clearly demonstrate that spacecraft smoke detector design cannot be based on 1-g experience.

Urban, D. L.↗
NASA NTRS2002

MODIS Observations of Smoke and Fires

The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instruments collect daily measurements of our planet since early 2000 from the Terra spaceborne polar platform. It has unique channels to observe smoke over land and ocean and to observe fires. Using unsaturated channels at 3.9 micron MODIS detects the fires and estimates the fire radiative energy. Using solar channels in the visible (0.47 and 0.66 micron) and in the mid IR (2.1 micron) MODIS measures the smoke optical thickness distribution and evolution over the land. Seven Channels in the solar spectrum are used to detect the smoke properties and distribution over the oceans. Data from the Aerosol Robotic Network, are used to validate the MODIS observations. The MODIS aerosol data presented in a movie form is used to observe the generation of smoke plumes and their dispersion around the globe. For example a key conclusion is that smoke in particular from Southern Africa can pollute significantly the 'pristine' Southern Hemisphere zonal range of 45'S-60'S, and the Northern Pacific.

Kaufman, Yoram↗
NASA NTRS2001

Remote Sensing of Fires and Smoke from the Earth Observing System MODIS Instrument

The talk will include review of the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) algorithms and performance e.g. the MODIS algorithm and the changes in the algorithm since launch. Comparison of MODIS and ASTER fire observations. Summary of the fall activity with the Forest Service in use of MODIS data for the fires in the North-West. Validation on the ground of the MODIS fire product.

Kaufman, Y. J.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Fire and smoke retardant materials development

The research to provide a mechanism for dissipation of impact energy in filled polymers by using fillers with a low modulus coating is reported which will dissipate energy through shearing and crazing instead of fracture. The approach offers the advantages of low cost, low toxicity, and applicability to various resins.

Mueller, W. A.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Smoke and fire characteristics for cerrado and deforestation burns in Brazil - BASE-B experiment

Five test fires were performed during August and September 1990 in the cerrado (savannalike region) in central Brazil (three fires) and tropical moist forest (two fires) in the eastern Amazon. This paper details the gases released, the ratios of the gases to each other and to particulate matter, fuel loads, and the fraction consumed (combustion factors), and the fire behavior associated with biomass consumption. Models are presented for evaluating emission factors for CH4, CO2, CO, H2, and particles less than 2.5 micron diam (PM2.5) as a function of combustion efficiency. The ratio of carbon released as CO2 (combustion efficiency) for the cerrado fires averaged 0.94 and for the deforestation fires it decreased from 0.88 for the flaming phase to less than 0.80 during the smoldering phase of combustion. For tropical ecosystems, emissions of most products of incomplete combustion are projected to be lower than previous estimates for savanna ecosystems and somewhat higher for fires used for deforestation purposes.

Ward, D. E.↗
NASA NTRS2007

Spacecraft Fire Detection: Smoke Properties and Transport in Low-Gravity

Results from a recent smoke particle size measurement experiment conducted on the International Space Station (ISS) are presented along with the results from a model of the transport of smoke in the ISS. The experimental results show that, for the materials tested, a substantial portion of the smoke particles are below 500 nm in diameter. The smoke transport model demonstrated that mixing dominates the smoke transport and that consequently detection times are longer than in normal gravity.

Urban, David L.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Emissions Characterization and Smoke Transport of A Prescribed Fire

Under the background of climate change, vast regions of the world will face a hotter and probably drier future that favors ignition and spread of wildfires. This poses additional challenges to the communities who are fighting the ever-larger wildfires. Fire and smoke models are valuable tools to fire managers and decision-makers to mitigate the impact of fires. Existing fire modeling systems bear large uncertainties due to the difficulty in collecting data to characterize fire behavior and smoke transport. More observations are urgently needed for improvement of fire modeling and reduction in model uncertainty. The coordinated prescribed burn experiment, such as the Fire and Smoke Model and Measurement Evaluation Experiment (FSMMEE), will allow the concurrent collection of critical measurements of fuel, fire behavior, smoke, and meteorology to better understand and model fires. In this preliminary investigation, we employed the data from the prescribed burn experiment at Langdon Mountain, Utah, in November 2019, to reconstruct the fire emissions and characterize the smoke transport. The NASA Unified Weather Research and Forecasting Model (NU-WRF) was utilized to assist in identifying the potential pre-fire remote sensing capabilities, such as fuel load, moisture, and fire radiative power, which are helpful to model development and advancement. Along the way, two sets of NU-WRF experiments would be done by applying either a default fire emissions inventory (i.e., NASA’s Quick Fire Emissions Dataset, QFED) or reconstructed fire emissions using the data collected from the prescribed fire. The results would help answer the questions such as “How do reconstructed emissions compare to QFED emissions and their impact on plume transport”.

NU-WRF↗
NASA NTRS1992

Kuwait oil fires - Compositions of source smoke

While the Kuwait oil-fire smoke plumes manifested a pronounced impact on solar radiation in the Gulf region (such as visibility and surface temperatures), smoke plume concentrations of combustion-generated pollutants suggest that the overall chemical impact on the atmosphere of the smoke from these fires was probably much less than anticipated. Combustion in the Kuwaiti oil fires was surprisingly efficient, releasing on average more than 93 percent of the combusted hydrocarbon fuels as CO2. Correspondingly, combustion-produced quantities of carbon monoxide (CO) and carbonaceous particles were low, each about 2 percent by weight. The fraction of CH4 produced by the fires was also relatively low (about 0.2 percent), but source emissions of nonmethane hydrocarbons were high (about 2 percent). Processes other than combustion (e.g., volatilization) probably contributed significantly to the measured in-plume hydrocarbon concentrations. Sulfur emissions (particulate and gaseous) measured at the source fires were lower (about 0.5 percent) than predicted based on average sulfur contents in the crude. N2O emissions from the Kuwaiti oil fires were very low and often could not be distinguished from background concentrations.

Cofer, Wesley R., III↗
NASA NTRS2003

"Smoke": Characterization Of Smoke Particulate For Spacecraft Fire Detection

The "Smoke" experiment is a flight definition investigation that seeks to increase our understanding of spacecraft fire detection through measurements of particulate size distributions of preignition smokes from typical spacecraft materials. Owing to the catastrophic risk posed by even a very small fire in a spacecraft, the design goal for spacecraft fire detection is to detect the fire as quickly as possible, preferably in the preignition phase before a real flaming fire has developed. Consequently the target smoke for detection is typically not soot (typical of established hydrocarbon fires) but instead, pyrolysis products, and recondensed polymer particles. At the same time, false alarms are extremely costly as the crew and the ground team must respond quickly to every alarm. The U.S. Space Shuttle (STS: Space Transportation System) and the International Space Station (ISS) both use smoke detection as the primary means of fire detection. These two systems were designed in the absence of any data concerning low-gravity smoke particle (and background dust) size distributions. The STS system uses an ionization detector coupled with a sampling pump and the ISS system is a forward light scattering detector operating in the near IR. These two systems have significantly different sensitivities with the ionization detector being most sensitive (on a mass concentration basis) to smaller particulate and the light scattering detector being most sensitive to particulate that is larger than 1 micron. Since any smoke detection system has inherent size sensitivity characteristics, proper design of future smoke detection systems will require an understanding of the background and alarm particle size distributions that can be expected in a space environment.

Urban, David L.↗
NASA NTRS2004

Application of MODIS-Derived Active Fire Radiative Energy to Fire Disaster and Smoke Pollution Monitoring

The radiative energy emitted by large fires and the corresponding smoke aerosol loading are simultaneously measured from the MODIS sensor from both the Terra and Aqua satellites. Quantitative relationships between the rates of emission of fire radiative energy and smoke are being developed for different fire-prone regions of the globe. Preliminary results are presented. When fully developed, the system will enable the use of MODIS direct broadcast fire data for near real-time monitoring of fire strength and smoke emission as well as forecasting of fire progression and smoke dispersion, several hours to a few days in advance.

Ichoku, Charles↗
NASA NTRS1999

A Grouped Threshold Approach for Scene Identification in AVHRR Imagery

The authors propose a grouped threshold method for scene identification in Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer imagery that may contain clouds, fire, smoke, or snow. The philosophy of the approach is to build modules that contain groups of spectral threshold tests that are applied concurrently, not sequentially, to each pixel in an image. The purpose of each group of tests is to identify uniquely a specific class in the image, such as smoke. A strength of this approach is that insight into the limits used in the threshold tests may be gained through the use of radiative transfer theory. Methodology and examples are provided for two different scenes, one containing clouds, forest fires, and smoke; and the other containing clouds over snow in the central United States. For both scenes, a limited amount of supporting information is provided by surface observers.

Baum, Bryan A.↗
NASA NTRS2011

Enhancements in Deriving Smoke Emission Coefficients from Fire Radiative Power Measurements

Smoke emissions have long been quantified after-the-fact by simple multiplication of burned area, biomass density, fraction of above-ground biomass, and burn efficiency. A new algorithm has been suggested, as described in Ichoku & Kaufman (2005), for use in calculating smoke emissions directly from fire radiative power (FRP) measurements such that the latency and uncertainty associated with the previously listed variables are avoided. Application of this new, simpler and more direct algorithm is automatic, based only on a fire's FRP measurement and a predetermined coefficient of smoke emission for a given location. Attaining accurate coefficients of smoke emission is therefore critical to the success of this algorithm. In the aforementioned paper, an initial effort was made to derive coefficients of smoke emission for different large regions of interest using calculations of smoke emission rates from MODIS FRP and aerosol optical depth (AOD) measurements. Further work had resulted in a first draft of a 1 1 resolution map of these coefficients. This poster will present the work done to refine this algorithm toward the first production of global smoke emission coefficients. Main updates in the algorithm include: 1) inclusion of wind vectors to help refine several parameters, 2) defining new methods for calculating the fire-emitted AOD fractions, and 3) calculating smoke emission rates on a per-pixel basis and aggregating to grid cells instead of doing so later on in the process. In addition to a presentation of the methodology used to derive this product, maps displaying preliminary results as well as an outline of the future application of such a product into specific research opportunities will be shown.

Ellison, Luke↗
NASA NTRS1998

Smoke, Clouds, and Radiation-Brazil (SCAR-B) Experiment

The Smoke, Clouds, and Radiation-Brazil (SCAR-B) field project took place in the Brazilian Amazon and cerrado regions in August-September 1995 as a collaboration between Brazilian and American scientists. SCAR-B, a comprehensive experiment to study biomass burning, emphasized measurements of surface biomass, fires, smoke aerosol and trace gases, clouds, and radiation. their climatic effects, and remote sensing from aircraft and satellites. It included aircraft and ground-based in situ measurements of smoke emission factors and the compositions, sizes, and optical properties of the smoke particles; studies of the formation of ozone; the transport and evolution of smoke; and smoke interactions with water vapor and clouds. This overview paper introduces SCAR-B and summarizes some of the main results obtained so far. (1) Fires: measurements of the size distribution of fires, using the 50 m resolution MODIS Airborne Simulator, show that most of the fires are small (e.g. 0.005 square km), but the satellite sensors (e.g., AVHRR and MODIS with I km resolution) can detect fires in Brazil which are responsible for 60-85% of the burned biomass: (2) Aerosol: smoke particles emitted from fires increase their radius by as much as 60%, during their first three days in the atmosphere due to condensation and coagulation, reaching a mass median radius of 0.13-0.17 microns: (3) Radiative forcing: estimates of the globally averaged direct radiative forcing due to smoke worldwide, based on the properties of smoke measured in SCAR-B (-O.l to -0.3 W m(exp -2)), are smaller than previously modeled due to a lower single-scattering albedo (0.8 to 0.9), smaller scattering efficiency (3 square meters g(exp -2) at 550 nm), and low humidification factor; and (4) Effect on clouds: a good relationship was found between cloud condensation nuclei and smoke volume concentrations, thus an increase in the smoke emission is expected to affect cloud properties. In SCAR-B, new techniques were developed for deriving the absorption and refractive index of smoke from ground-based remote sensing. Future spaceborne radiometers (e.g., MODIS on the Earth Observing System), simulated on aircraft, proved to be very useful for monitoring smoke properties, surface properties, and the impacts of smoke on radiation and climate.

Kaufman, Y. J.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Emissions of nitrous oxide from biomass burning

A study has been conducted which compared N2O results obtained over large prescribed fires or wildfires, in which 'grab-sampling' with storage had been used with N2O measurements made in near-real time. CO2-normalized emission ratios obtained initially from the laboratory fires are substantially lower than those obtained over large-scale biomass fires. Combustion may not be the only source of N2O in large fire smoke plumes; physical, chemical, and biochemical processes in the soil may be altered by large biomass fires, leading to large N2O releases.

Winstead, Edward L.↗