Wildfires from Space

01For a fire you just need three ingredients.

02You need something to burn.

03You need weather conditions that are dry enough to allow that fire to happen.

04And you need an ignition.

05There's always a fire burning someplace on Earth.

06And we know that because we have satellites that give us coverage of the whole globe every day.

07Every year from space we detect more than a million large fires.

08A large fire in this case might be something the size of 40 acres or larger.

09Each of those fires represents those same common ingredients that are needed to burn.

10And most of those fires are started by people.

11Fires that spread over many days actually account for most of the burning.

12We will ultimately detect and map from space.

13Those fires are more typically called wildfires because they've escaped the management control and burned for many days.

14This is NASA's Curious Universe.

15Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

16I'm your host, Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

17Wildfires are extremely destructive forces of nature.

18When they get out of control, they can burn down buildings and destroy forests.

19With climate change, wildfires are becoming more frequent and more destructive.

20And burning in places they never have before.

21NASA, NOAA, and other government agencies use satellites to track fires from space.

22With a view from above, we can prioritize on a global scale which fires need to be put out and which can keep burning without harming anyone.

23In this episode, let's learn about wildfires.

24How NASA tracks them from space, how they're changing with our climate, and how they can affect you, no matter where you live.

25Our satellites have an incredible sensitivity to detecting active fires.

26Even very small fires, the kind of thing that you might not think would be detected.

27No, we don't know whether you've got the grill on in the backyard.

28And no, we don't know about your new fire pit.

29But yes, a fire that might be the size of half a tennis court is big enough for us to be able to detect with our satellite sensors on orbit.

30Did you recognize that voice?

31That's Doug Morton, a NASA Earth scientist and a guest on our very first Curious Universe episode, back in Season 1.

32Sometimes we describe a fire as a wildfire.

33That typically means it's a fire that's burning out of control.

34That doesn't mean it was started by a human or started by lightning.

35In fact, we often don't know the cause of most of the fires we see from space.

36We do know their impacts on ecosystems, communities, and on the emissions they release, and how that influences both quality of the air we breathe and the impact of greenhouse gases on climate change.

37Tracking wildfires is a major international effort that involves a lot of collaborators, from NOAA to fire management organizations, and even other space agencies.

38As a NASA scientist, I work very closely with scientists across the US federal government, other governments around the world, with the entire science community that's working to better understand how fires are changing ecosystems.

39This is a real community effort.

40We're certainly not going it alone.

41One of the things that makes me motivated every day is that it is part of that larger community of people that are working hard to try to do the best they can to learn, understand, and adapt to the changing reality of fires.

42A key collaboration for Doug and his team here at NASA is the collection of research scientists at the Canadian Space Agency, or CSA.

43No one knows how hard it is to track wildfires on the ground, and how important it is to map them from space, better than Josh Johnston.

44Josh worked on wildfire satellites for the CSA and the Canadian Forest Service.

45But he started his career in a very different role, as a wildland firefighter in remote northern Ontario.

46I am formerly a firefighter.

47I was an instant commander, seven years on fire crew.

48I don't want to say pre-Destiny is how I got into it, but I actually come from a family of firefighters.

49My father was actually quite well known in the community.

50My mother even was a dispatcher briefly.

51And despite her best efforts, we did follow in my father's footsteps.

52My brother is still in the fire program.

53My sister was one of the clerks, a radio operator there for many years.

54In this part of the country, fighting fire meant hauling in pumps and hoes.

55Imagine being in northern Canada in a place so remote that the sound of your pump is such a foreign sound, that moose are coming up to check out what's going on.

56It's brutal work in some ways, right?

57Because you're hauling heavy packs and you're just doing relay runs through the forest like that.

58You're always soaking wet from the hose, and the fire is so hot and dry that you're always dry at the same time.

59When Josh started fighting fires, his team relied on trained spotters in airplanes and in mountaintop fire lookout towers to keep an eye out for plumes of smoke.

60When a lookout spotted some smoke, they'd alert Josh and his crew at the base.

61Where there's smoke, there's fire.

62We'd be sitting around the base.

63If you're on alert, you're already kitted up in uniform.

64If you're red alert, you've got to be airborne in three minutes from dispatch.

65It's like you're holding a lotto ticket and you're just waiting for them to call the numbers.

66A helicopter would fly Josh's team out to fight the fire, dropping them off in the forest, often many days' walk from the nearest road.

67These weren't always large, raging fires you might be picturing.

68Sometimes they could be really hard to find.

69I think sometimes people picture you detect a fire and there's flames coming up and they're running away.

70No, you're trying to find it when it's smoldering and it's on the ground.

71Because that gives you time to actually catch it and try and suppress it.

72Firefighters only have so many resources.

73And even from planes, it was impossible to keep track of every new fire and catch it before it got too big.

74Some fires burned out of control.

75That's when firefighting got really intense and fire squads would have to use what's called an air attack.

76Imagine huge planes carrying tanks of water to drop on the flames.

77Sometimes these air attacks still barely made a dent in the fire.

78You take off and you're headed for a fire.

79And you see it from 50 nautical miles out.

80And it's just a big towering black column.

81There's no way you're going to be able to stop this thing and you're calling in more resources and air attack and everything.

82You pull your crew out of the drop zone.

83They hit it, they knock the flames out of the canopy and the guys run back in with the hose and try and catch it while it's still low.

84You only got a few minutes before the next tanker comes in and everyone runs back out.

85Other times in the mountains, the smoke would get so thick, so close to the ground, that airplanes couldn't fly to keep tabs on the flames.

86It was raging, smoky fires like these that made Josh wish he had a view from space to track the fire's spread.

87If you have a very smoky fire, very smoky region, you can ground all the aircraft in that region for an extended period of time.

88But the beautiful thing about infrared satellites is they still see through smoke, which is a really handy trait in these sorts of scenarios.

89If you aren't a wildland firefighter or NASA Earth scientist, or you just don't live someplace currently threatened by wildfires, it might be hard to relate to all of this.

90But whether you live in a big city or a remote forest, wildfires affect you.

91Maybe you've seen the smoke even far from the fire.

92After large fires, it can rise from the flames way up into the stratosphere, sticking around for days and weeks at the edge of space.

93Canadian fires can often cause hazy conditions across the United States, covering the skies with a thick, dark blanket of smoke.

94It can circulate everywhere.

95It's not uncommon for us good old Canadians to smoke out the southern U.S.

96or the eastern seaboard.

97I apologize for that, but it is the nature of the beast.

98That smoke can affect your health if you breathe it in, and it can have far-reaching effects over entire nations.

99Smoke is one of those things that impacts our society in ways that we don't even understand.

100There's been estimates that the cost of fire management in our country can be as much as $2 billion a year.

101But the cost of smoke on our economy can be as much as $20 billion a year.

102Fires also release greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere, which causes our climate to warm up.

103The warmer and drier the climate, the easier it is for even more fires to start.

104So fires don't just affect individual forests and towns, or even individual countries.

105They affect the whole world.

106For a global problem, one that's changing fast with our climate, we need a global perspective.

107That's where satellites come in.

108They weren't around when Josh fought fires.

109But now they're a major component of firefighting.

110Here's Doug again.

111As a scientist at NASA, it's my job to use our amazing satellites on orbit and our scientific expertise to study how fires are changing our planet.

112With our global picture, we're better able to understand that fires burn an incredibly large extent to the land surface every year.

113Something approaching the size of Australia burns every year.

114And those fires, more than a million large fire events, are something that we can track using our satellite data to better understand how those fires are becoming more common, more severe, or burning hotter, faster, and longer than they have before.

115So how exactly do satellites detect fires?

116As our satellites pass over, when we detect a new active fire, what we're detecting is actually the thermal energy that's being released from the surface from the combustion process.

117We're looking for those areas that are releasing more temperature at the surface than what we would expect for a forest or even a desert.

118To find hotspots, NASA satellites use infrared sensors.

119To those special sensors, fires on the ground look extremely bright compared to the ground around them.

120Once a fire is detected and firefighters are alerted, scientists like Doug can use other data to predict how dangerous it might be.

121Information we have about a new active fire that we detect can be combined with information that we have about the land cover, whether it's a forest, a savanna, an area of agriculture, as well as other information that would help us understand how dry and flammable the vegetation is, or the history of rainfall and what that might mean for the chance that fire could grow and spread over time.

122After the fire is out, satellites can also assess its impact on the environment, whether the next rainfall on a burned hillside might cause a landslide, or how quickly forests will grow back.

123Doug can even make predictions about where fires are most likely to occur next, based on how hot and dry the landscape is, or where lightning storms are appearing.

124That's increasingly important as our climate changes and warms.

125With more frequent and extreme drought conditions, fire seasons are getting longer.

126And more intense lightning storms mean more chances for fires to start.

127Fires are even starting in places scientists thought couldn't burn, like the Arctic permafrost.

128We're starting to identify fires in new places that don't have a long history of fire.

129Places like the Arctic tundra, where conditions are normally too wet and too cold to allow fires to start.

130Permafrost, or frozen soils, are starting to melt and drain, creating conditions where fires could burn across the surface.

131Scientists are learning that in some parts of Canada's boreal forests, fires don't even go out over the winter when fire season ends.

132They burn deep down into the organic soil for months.

133This has been one of the more surprising findings in the last several years in the fire science community.

134So a fire may overwinter based on its ability to survive, with a smoldering through the surface of the soil and then reignite.

135It's not a coincidence when we see those fires in the same place the following year.

136With more than two decades of observations from space, Doug has detected big changes in where fires are burning.

137He even has data on how carbon dioxide emissions from fires have changed over that period.

138Fires are one of the most important sources of greenhouse gases, including from human activity.

139Together with our understanding of how fire releases specific kinds of greenhouse gases and aerosols, we're able to create a model of how fires, on a worldwide basis, are a component of our changing atmosphere.

140Doug uses six NASA satellites to track wildfires.

141But none of them are fully dedicated to the job.

142They're designed mainly to study things like crops, forests, and water vapor.

143We've learned so much already from these trusty satellites.

144But imagine what we could do with one that's specifically designed to track fires.

145Josh, the former wildland firefighter, is the lead scientist on a project from the Canadian Space Agency called WildfireSat.

146It'll be the first satellite ever made solely to track wildfires.

147The real goal of WildfireSat as a satellite mission is to build the satellite for the express purpose of doing this.

148Not as a peripheral benefit that came from a system that was designed for other purposes.

149No.

150This is made for this job.

151We don't have compromises hiding in there to accommodate other off-topic uses.

152The team plans to launch the satellite in 2029.

153With a targeted mission like this, scientists will be able to get richer details on wildfires and their impact on our interconnected global ecosystem.

154The goal of the mission is to provide surveillance to track fires.

155We can tell you how fast it's moving.

156We can tell you which direction it's headed.

157We can tell you where it's going and when it's going to get there.

158When paired with some of the other science that's in our agencies, that also allows you to make pretty good assessments about what is the right approach to this fire?

159Should I fight it?

160Should I let it go?

161If I do choose to fight it, what's the right tool for the job?

162Do I need bulldozers?

163Do I need air tankers?

164Can I just send a crew on the ground?

165Firefighters can't fight every fire that starts.

166Knowing which ones will burn out on their own and which have to be fought is very important in deciding what to prioritize.

167But to do that, fire managers have to be able to track fires during critical times of day.

168The best time of day to track fires is 6pm because the late afternoon is peak burn period.

169As the sun dries forests out throughout the day, they become ideal fuel for fires.

170So later in the evening, fires burn the most intensely.

171Fires are a strange beast.

172They tend to behave a lot like a living creature.

173They wake up in the morning and they're kind of lazy.

174Around noon, they start to wake up and get real busy.

175Late afternoon, they're just on a tear.

176And then if they're doing what they should be doing, they go to sleep overnight.

177It's not always the case these days.

178In that late afternoon period, when they're busy, we call that peak burn.

179That's when fires are doing real bad things.

180During their orbital paths, NASA's current polar orbiting satellites pass over in the morning and early afternoon.

181Missing the peak burn time completely.

182What we've done is put ours right in the middle of that time of day when fires are at their absolute peak activity.

183The new Canadian wildfire sat will form what's called a virtual constellation with two NASA satellites, filling in that gap in the data.

184The three satellites will fly in a formation, working together and providing data at different times of day.

185During that peak burn period, we now have an observation of where the fire was at the start of it, and where it was towards the end of it.

186In near real time, we can tell people if the fire moved during peak burn, how far did it go, and which direction did it go.

187Things have definitely changed a lot since Josh was a firefighter.

188Back then, the little bits of information firefighters got from planes and on-the-ground reports were enough.

189Back then, I would just get briefings, and the briefings would say things like, X-fire, 50,000 hectares, not under control.

190But that's literally all the intel I would ever see.

191We didn't have a full picture of each and every one of them, especially the very remote ones.

192That whole point behind this mission, it's there to give the decision makers a lot better information to make a decision on, especially under climate change.

193The decisions are getting harder.

194The timing is getting shorter.

195And I think that in terms of doing triage on a day when you have a massive surge of fire activity, like I can think of days where just in my sector, we would have had a hundred fires.

196If you're trying to be the guy who's in the command center determining where you're going to send air tankers, it would be really, really nice to know if some of those new ones that are coming in and that massive surge, you could probably let burn for two weeks and it wouldn't matter.

197That's the sort of intel that will really change the way operations happen.

198My father back in 86 did come home insisting that satellites were going to change the way we did things.

199And it's kind of ironic that his son is the one who's leading that charge now.

200Slightly different timeline, but he was on point.

201For Josh, a wildfire satellite would have been nice to have.

202For the next generation, it'll be absolutely necessary.

203It would have been cool when I was in the business.

204It would have been futuristic stuff when my dad was working.

205Accepting the reality that my children will almost certainly follow behind us, the number of high pressure decisions is going to go up.

206The number of those days when you have just a massive surge of fire activity on the landscape and everything's going wrong, those days are going to go up.

207For them, it won't be a novelty and it won't be something neat.

208For them, it will be an absolute necessity.

209And that's why we're doing this.

210We're doing this now because we know by the time it gets into orbit, it'll be late.

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