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NASA NTRSDate not supplied

On-ground Live Fuel Moisture Content Sampling Along California’s Central Coast Santa Lucia Preserve - Carmel Valley, CA

The ratio of water to dry mass within live plants is an important factor when determining the severity and intensity of potential wildfires. Currently, live fuel moisture content (LFMC) samples support wildland fire management, but are limited in number and spatial extent. In Monterey County, the only LFMC data to analyze spatial and temporal trends is collected by CalFire and the Los Padres National Forest Unit of the United States Forest Service across five long-term sampling sites. Our project aims to enhance the spatial coverage of current LFMC data being collected across Monterey County. Here, we share results from the ongoing work to monitor LFMC across Carmel Valley, CA. We evaluate LFMC data by environmental factors such as slope, aspect, topography, and species composition. We also place our LFMC samples in relation to nearby long-term sampling locations. We conclude by interpreting spatial and temporal trends in the preliminary data and discuss logistical challenges of establishing more long-term LFMC sampling sites to better represent the complex topography and vegetation composition of Central California.

On-ground↗
NASA NTRS2024

Communications System Concept of Operations (ConOp) for Supporting Second Shift (SS) Operations

Wildland fires take place most often in remote areas without access to communications infrastructure. Communication during wildfire operations is crucial for safe and effective command and control of air assets, ground-based firefighters, and fire management. Without connectivity, Incident Command (IC) cannot exchange information, receive alerts or work with all parties involved in the wildfire suppression operation. Current policy directs IC to use voice radio communications, which require no prior infrastructure, to provide information needed for the command, control and safety of personnel and resources. Cellular communications are used only for logistical purposes unless no other method is available. To address some of the shortcomings of the current state of communications, the Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations (ACERO) Second Shift (SS) technical team is developing characteristics of an air-to-ground Mesh Radio System (MRS) and preparing for a future demonstration. The MRS will allow air and ground assets to automatically join a radio network without relying on existing infrastructure and exchange information critical to maintaining situation awareness and air traffic management by the onsite IC. The MRS will also give users more options for communications in addition to voice communications.

David Fuller↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Improving Satellite-Based Hotspot Detection Through Deep Learning-Enabled Smoke Recognition

While geostationary satellites, such as the GOES-R series, provide wildland fire hotspot readings at a high temporal resolution, they are prone to false negative readings and decreased confidence. One cause of decreased hotspot confidence is cloud contamination. Smoke produced from wildfire is often misinterpreted as cloud contamination, resulting in inaccurate and unsure sensor readings. To this end, we built a deep learning image segmentation model to identify smoke and cloud in true color satellite images. The model is pre-trained using self-supervised learning on over 10,000 GOES-R images to learn the underlying structure of satellite imagery. Then, the model is fine-tuned on a set of 130 labeled documents using supervised learning. The resulting model performs multi-class image segmentation with 85% accuracy and runs in under a minute on a standard personal computer. When paired alongside hotspot data, the model’s outputs can help increase confidence in wildfire location by identifying cases of cloud contamination that are due to smoke. The resulting model can be deployed in a stand-alone application or bundled in an Open Data Integration for wildland fire management (ODIN) application.

Earth observation↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Addressing Critical Knowledge Gaps on Wildland Fires with UAS Technology

To better predict and respond to extreme fire behavior, wind shear, and superheated gases, there is a need for enhanced tactical microclimate wind forecasting. Collecting real-time or near-real-time three-dimensional atmospheric data during wildland fire suppression is vital for both ground firefighters and aviation safety. The use of balloons for soundings is not allowed due to aircraft operations, so new technology must be used. To address this need, the NASA FireSense Project has invested in co-developing and transitioning advanced technologies for atmospheric data collection to operational platforms to support decisions for wildland fire management. One of these technology investments has been with Uninhabited Aerial Systems (UAS) for atmospheric soundings. In collaboration with MITRE Corporation, a technology demonstration of Uninhabited Aerial Systems (UAS) for atmospheric soundings was held in Missoula, MT. This demonstration featured a NASA-designed payload on a Freefly Alta-X UAS, consistent with USFS UAS operations, balloon-borne soundings for data validation, and microscale modeling efforts. Results of this effort will be presented including comparison of forecasted conditions to data collection values as well as the impact on forecasts given real-time mixing heights and dispersion levels.

Jennifer Fowler↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Informing Wildfire Needs: The Expanded User Interface of NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (Firms)

As the global community continues to experience, and respond to, living in a changing environment, access to tools, technologies, and timely data utilized by an increasingly diverse set of stakeholders is increasing. This year, 2023, has thus far seen an unprecedented number of extreme events, increasingly driven by changes in the climate and a strong 2023 ENSO pattern. In Canada, a record number of wildfires, and associated weather events, evacuations, and infrastructure and habitat destruction has taken place, and is ongoing. Large swaths of Greece have experienced similar wildfire destruction. Most recently, Maui has experienced destructive wildfires, and early 2023 saw massive wildfires in Chile. NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System, or FIRMS, has a fifteen-year history of providing timely and comprehensive data and information on wildfires to stakeholders. FIRMS was initially developed in 2007 by the University of Maryland, with funds from NASA's Applied Sciences Program and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO), to provide near real-time active fire Locations to natural resource managers that faced challenges obtaining timely satellite-derived fire information. FIRMS has consistently evolved to address the needs of stakeholders Living in a changing environment; in 2012 it transitioned to NASA LANCE and in 2021 through a partnership between NASA and the US Forest Service, an updated version of FIRMS was released for the US and Canada. As NASA and other federal agencies continue to accelerate Open Science through integrated efforts such as the Year of Open Science, the provision of readily discoverable, findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable data represents a major focus to facilitate equitable outcomes. FIRMS supports this acceleration in Open Science by continuing to provision data and information for its traditional user base, while addressing the novel user needs of an increasingly diverse set of stakeholders seeking robust, reliable, transparently generated data and information. Increasingly, FIRMS is utilized by citizen scientists and individuals directly affected by wildfires - through evacuations, risks to structures/homes, poor air quality. etc. FIRMS has also been Leveraged to detect and assess the impacts resulting from ongoing conflicts. This further highlights the multi-faceted impacts of wildfires and other events. In the Fall of 2023, FIRMS will release an expanded User Interface (UI). This interface captures and reflects the needs of, and input from, a multitude of users. These users range from federal agency representatives to non-government organizations to the private sector to citizen science entities. To respond to this expansive and diverse user need base, the updated FIRMS UI will capture a range of features to support those beginning to explore the range of data and tools available to inform wildfire awareness and knowledge. These users are supported through a Basic Mode interface, furnishing access to a light set of functionalities that provision straight-forward, readily usable information and data, and ingestible knowledge. The Advanced Mode interface supports those stakeholder groups already proficient in navigating FIRMS. These stakeholders, representing fire managers and others, perform active fire management and tactical wildfire response activities. For these stakeholders, additional datasets have been included which require in-depth knowledge of both the utility as well as the caveats of such datasets. Additional functionalities have also been embedded to aid specific user queries. The expanded UI will introduce a new Experimental Mode. The focus of this UI will be to support the provision of emerging and innovative datasets that are in development for review and comment by the user community Examples include post-fire products generated by NASA's Earth Information System (EIS) Fire. This presentation will provide an overview of the expanded FIRMS UI. We will discuss how this UI is designed to be scalable and support the unique needs of an expanding and diverse user base. We will highlight key features, elements, and datasets, and describe how user needs have informed and guided the design of the UI. We will also share recent use cases to convey, and increase awareness, among conference participants. As the global community faces more extreme wildfires, due to climate variability and change, there is an increased need for reliable data to inform, manage, and mitigate the impacts of these events. Through this work, NASA FIRMS is striving to level the playing field, by making information accessible to all; from policy makers to the private sector to historically marginalized communities. In doing so, NASA is promoting the all-hands-on-deck response needed to minimize the impacts of wildfires and harness the strengths of open science to address the greatest environmental challenge faced.

Jenny Hewson↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Overview of the NASA Earth Action Strategies Wildland Fire Initiative

As part of NASA’s new Earth Action strategy, the Wildland Fire initiative was established, which includes both the NASA Wildland Fire Program (WFP) and the FireSense project. NASA has over 50 years of experience generating data and technology to enhance fire science and operational management. The WFP’s mission is threefold: 1) assemble communities of practice through collaborative efforts with government, academia, and the private sector; 2) co-develop knowledge and applications with relevant partners and stakeholders in the wildfire community; and 3) improve wildland fire management through the transitioning of NASA data, technology, tools, and science to stakeholder organizations. The WFP is focusing on supporting proactive fire management, including situational awareness, preparedness, and risk mitigation. This will be accomplished through selected projects that identify management challenges, relevant to partners and end users, and the NASA data that will be utilized to deliver innovative solutions to enhance the management of wildland fires. Examples include: i) investigation of evaporative stress from OpenET to help predict the risk of wildfire occurrence in watersheds; ii) incorporation of space based LiDAR for the generation of 3-dimensional forest fuel metrics, used to improve wildfire risk and behavior models; iii) integration of global, multi-platform geostationary active-fire data in near-real-time into NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS); and iv) identification of post-fire ecohydrological conditions using thermal, multispectral, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and hyperspectral remotely-sensed data to improve flood hazard forecast models. The FireSense project is a US-focused 5-year project that will focus on delivering NASA’s unique Earth science and technological capabilities to operational agencies, striving towards enhancing fire fighting and air quality management. The project will include airborne campaigns and new technology that will likely have global implications. Initial stakeholder engagement led FireSense to focus on four use-cases focused on the characterization and measurement of: (i) pre-fire fuels conditions, (ii) active fire-dynamics; (iii) post-fire impact and threats; and iv) air quality impacts and forecasting, each-developed with identified stakeholders.

Wildland Fire program↗
NASA NTRS2018

Evaluating the Socioeconomic Impacts of Rapid Assembly and Deployment of Geospatial Data in Wildfire Emergency Response Planning: A Case Study Using the NASA RECOVER Decision Support System (DSS)

Today’s extended fire seasons and large fire footprints have prompted state and federal land management agencies to devote increasingly larger portions of their budget to wildfire management. As fire costs continue to rise, timely and comprehensive fire information becomes increasingly critical to response and rehabilitation efforts. The NASA Rehabilitation Capability Convergence for Ecosystem Recovery (RECOVER) post-fire decision support system is a server-based application designed to rapidly provide land managers with the information needed to develop a comprehensive rehabilitation plan. This study tested the efficacy of RECOVER through structured interviews with land managers (n=15) who used RECOVER and were responsible for post-fire rehabilitation efforts on over 645 000 ha of fire-affected lands. Although the benefit of better-informed decisions is difficult to quantify, the results of this study illustrate RECOVER’s decision support capabilities provided information to land managers that either validated or altered their decisions on post-fire treatments estimated at over $1.2 million (USD) and saved nearly 800 hours of staff time by streamlining data collection as well as communication with local stakeholders and partnering agencies.

William Toombs↗
NASA NTRS2021

Southern Idaho Health & Air Quality II: Evaluating Atmospheric Mixing Height Estimations in the Western United States

Wildfires in the western United States have caused immense infrastructure damage and loss of human life in recent years. Wildfire smoke, which travels far from its original source, is also harmful to human health. Mixing height, which acts as a lid and prevents smoke from rising above a certain altitude in the lower troposphere, is a critical input in smoke dispersion and air quality models used by agencies that monitor wildfires. These models, coupled with forecaster expertise, are also used to decide when it is safe to execute a prescribed burn. The DEVELOPID team partnered with the National Weather Service (NWS) Fire Weather Program, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), and National Park Service (NPS) Fire Management Program Center (FMPC) to help improve reliability and confidence in mixing height estimations, and therefore the burn prescription decision-making process. To that end, the team developed a toolbox for measuring smoke-related aerosol mixing heights using Cloud-Aerosol LiDAR and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) Vertical Feature Mask granules. CALIPSO mixing heights and NWS estimations covaried significantly and positively. However, substantial disagreement between the methods stymied the team’s attempts to quantify systematic bias in a meaningful way. The relative error between the methods was especially large at low mixing heights, which suggests that this method of validation may only be suitable at higher altitudes.

Dean Berkowitz↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Analysis of Input from Wildfire Incident Experts to Identify Key Risks and Hazards in Wildfire Emergency Response

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) describes wildland fires as, “a force of nature that can be nearly as impossible to prevent, and as difficult to control, as hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.” Existing challenges in managing wildland fires often put first responders’ lives at risk. The emergence of drones and their capabilities to supplement human efforts could alleviate some, if not all, of those risks that first responders face during wildfire management efforts. However, the process of adding drones to wildfire response has come with its own challenges as well. NASA’s System-Wide Safety Project is working towards overcoming these challenges to enable routine transfer of risk from responders to aviation assets. The concept of operations and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) effort for this shift is underway. To inform and to validate the MBSE effort, we delivered a questionnaire to wildland firefighting experts on the hazards they currently face. This questionnaire has given us insight and a better understanding of the challenges related to the use of drones from a first responder’s point of view. We are using this information to better address responders’ concerns, develop a safety management system, and eliminate the roadblocks that prevent the use of drones in wildfire management.

Wildfire↗
NASA NTRS2021

Colorado Front Range Disasters: Understanding the Impact of Forest Management on the Cameron Peak and CalWood Fire

Along the Colorado Front Range, forest management has gained significant attention due to uncharacteristically large fires that burned late in 2020. The Cameron Peak Fire (largest in Colorado recorded history) and the CalWood Fire collectively burned an estimated 219,019 acres from August through December of 2020. Project partners at the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed, Colorado State Forest Service, Ben Delatour Scout Ranch, The Nature Conservancy, Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, and Colorado State University were interested in understanding the effectiveness of previous forest treatments in reducing burn severity within the Cameron Peak Fire and the CalWood Fire. We first collated a forest treatment dataset from pre-existing datasets by reclassifying over 29,000 treatments, which occurred across the Northern Colorado Front Range between 1970-2020. Secondly, we mapped three burn severity indices using Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI Earth observations and compared them to soil burn severity field data. Thirdly, a total of 35 topographic, disturbance, forest structure, and treatment predictor variables were generated across the fires. Finally, we assessed relationships between these predictor variables and burn severity using the random forest algorithm. Model results indicate that the primary drivers of burn severity were elevation and distance to treatment edge for the Cameron Peak Fire and fire area and forest canopy cover for the CalWood Fire. Further analysis of these variables paired with field data is necessary to understand the relationship between burn severity and treatments to guide future restoration efforts, improve forest resiliency, and mitigate fire risks.

Neal Swayze↗
NASA NTRS2021

Reviews and syntheses: Arctic fire regimes and emissions in the 21st century

In recent years, the pan-Arctic region has experienced increasingly extreme fire seasons. Fires in the northern high latitudes are driven by current and future climate change, lightning, fuel conditions, and human activity. In this context, conceptualizing and parameterizing current and future Arctic fire regimes will be important for fire and land management as well as understanding current and predicting future fire emissions. The objectives of this review were driven by policy questions identified by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) Working Group and posed to its Expert Group on Short-Lived Climate Forcers. This review synthesizes current understanding of the changing Arctic and boreal fire regimes, particularly as fire activity and its response to future climate change in the pan-Arctic have consequences for Arctic Council states aiming to mitigate and adapt to climate change in the north. The conclusions from our synthesis are the following. (1) Current and future Arctic fires, and the adjacent boreal region, are driven by natural (i.e. lightning) and human-caused ignition sources, including fires caused by timber and energy extraction, prescribed burning for landscape management, and tourism activities. Little is published in the scientific literature about cultural burning by Indigenous populations across the pan-Arctic, and questions remain on the source of ignitions above 70_ N in Arctic Russia. (2) Climate change is expected to make Arctic fires more likely by increasing the likelihood of extreme fire weather, increased lightning activity, and drier vegetative and ground fuel conditions. (3) To some extent, shifting agricultural land use and forest transitions from forest–steppe to steppe, tundra to taiga, and coniferous to deciduous in a warmer climate may increase and decrease open biomass burning, depending on land use in addition to climate-driven biome shifts. However, at the country and landscape scales, these relationships are not well established. (4) Current black carbon and PM2:5 emissions from wildfires above 50 and 65_ N are larger than emissions from heanthropogenic sectors of residential combustion, transportation, and flaring. Wildfire emissions have increased from 2010 to 2020, particularly above 60_ N, with 56% of black carbon emissions above 65_ N in 2020 attributed to open biomass burning – indicating how extreme the 2020 wildfire season was and how severe future Arctic wildfire seasons can potentially be. (5) What works in the boreal zones to prevent and fight wildfires may not work in the Arctic. Fire management will need to adapt to a changing climate, economic development, the Indigenous and local communities, and fragile northern ecosystems, including permafrost and peatlands. (6) Factors contributing to the uncertainty of predicting and quantifying future Arctic fire regimes include underestimation of Arctic fires by satellite systems, lack of agreement between Earth observations and official statistics, and still needed refinements of location, conditions, and previous fire return intervals on peat and permafrost landscapes. This review highlights that much research is needed in order to understand the local and regional impacts of the changing Arctic fire regime on emissions and the global climate, ecosystems, and pan-Arctic communities.

Arctic↗
NASA NTRS2007

Crew Exploration Vehicle Environmental Control and Life Support Fire Protection Approach

As part of preparing for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) worked on developing the requirements to manage the fire risk. The new CEV poses unique challenges to current fire protection systems. The size and configuration of the vehicle resembles the Apollo capsule instead of the current Space Shuttle or the International Space Station. The smaller free air volume and fully cold plated avionic bays of the CEV requires a different approach in fire protection than the ones currently utilized. The fire protection approach discussed in this paper incorporates historical lessons learned and fire detection and suppression system design philosophy spanning from Apollo to the International Space Station. Working with NASA fire and materials experts, this approach outlines the best requirements for both the closed out area of the vehicle, such as the avionics bay, and the crew cabin area to address the unique challenges due to the size and configuration of the CEV.

Lewis, John F.↗
NASA NTRS2021

Southern Idaho Health & Air Quality: Monitoring Atmospheric Mixing Heights Post-Wildfire Through the Use of NASA Earth Observations

Wildfire smoke has long-lasting impacts on public and environmental health. Currently, agencies that monitor smoke base their decisions on an analysis of how fires burn, the direction the smoke moves from the fire source, and unverified estimates of mixing height. Mixing heights describe the maximum altitude to which a smoke plume rises. Satellite imagery provides more continuous and accurate coverage of mixing heights than current in situ methods. Thus, the team developed a software tool that processes and extracts mixing height observations from Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) Vertical Feature Mask granules. The team partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service, the Bureau of Land Management’s National Interagency Fire Center, and the National Park Service’s Fire Management Program Center to analyze historic fire events in southern Idaho. To do so, they used Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), and Terra and Aqua Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to verify where a CALIPSO pass intersects thermal anomalies and smoke plumes. The software extracts features of relevance from the hdf file of each CALIPSO transect to locate layers of continuous aerosols. The maximum altitude at which the aerosol ends is recorded as the mixing height, along with a matching latitude and longitude. The satellite-derived values can be used to validate past mixing height predictions and evaluate the accuracy and systematic bias of different estimation methods. These results may allow agencies to make better comparisons and subsequent smoke pollution management, prevention, and public health decisions if the spatial and temporal differences between predictions and observations can be resolved.

DEVELOP Project Summary↗
NASA NTRS2014

Integrating Land Cover Modeling and Adaptive Management to Conserve Endangered Species and Reduce Catastrophic Fire Risk

Land cover modeling is used to inform land management, but most often via a two-step process where science informs how management alternatives can influence resources and then decision makers can use this to make decisions. A more efficient process is to directly integrate science and decision making, where science allows us to learn to better accomplish management objectives and is developed to address specific decisions. Co-development of management and science is especially productive when decisions are complicated by multiple objectives and impeded by uncertainty. Multiple objectives can be met by specification of tradeoffs, and relevant uncertainty can be addressed through targeted science (i.e., models and monitoring). We describe how to integrate habitat and fuels monitoring with decision making focused on dual objectives of managing for endangered species and minimizing catastrophic fire risk. Under certain conditions, both objectives might be achieved by a similar management policy, but habitat trajectories suggest tradeoffs. Knowledge about system responses to actions can be informed by applying competing management actions to different land units in the same system state and by ideas about fire behavior. Monitoring and management integration is important to optimize state-specific management decisions and increase knowledge about system responses. We believe this approach has broad utility for and cover modeling programs intended to inform decision making.

adaptive management↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NASA Update: Wildland Fire Element

As the NASA ESD, Applied Science Program, Associate Program Manager responsible for the agency's Wildland Fire Program portfolio, Vince Ambrosia manages and oversees NASA's participation in developments of Earth Observations capabilities supporting improved wildland fire management. The Wildland Fire Program has been subsumed within the ASP Disaster Program element and focuses on the NASA progress developments of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Global Wildfire Information System, where V. Ambrosia also serves as the GEO-GWIS NASA representative to the international panel. The NASA GWIS developments for the past year are highlighted in the briefing. In addition, other wildland fire-related NASA projects are also highlighted in this presentation, providing a context for the various successful developments and operationalization of Earth Observing systems data by partner entities and organizations involved in fire management.

Vince Ambrosia↗