By BlueShift and AFP | 2025-01-27

PARIS -- Scientists and engineers are hoping that the growing availability of satellite data will help tackle future deadly wildfires following the devastating blazes in Los Angeles.

Tech-focused groups are launching new orbiters as space launches become cheaper, while machine-learning techniques will sift the torrent of information, fitting it into a wider picture of fire risk.

Satellites "can detect from space areas that are dry and prone to wildfire outbreaks.... actively flaming and smoldering fires, as well as burnt areas and smoke and trace gas emissions," said Clement Albergel, director of actionable climate information at the European Space Agency (ESA).

"We can learn from all these types of elements."

Different satellites have different roles depending on their orbit and sensor payload.

Low Earth orbit is generally less than 1,000km above the surface. Satellites here offer high-resolution ground images but see any given point only briefly as they sweep around the planet.

Geostationary satellites orbit at about 36,000km, remaining over the same area on the Earth's surface -- allowing for continuous observation but usually at much lower resolution.

As climate change brings growing numbers of wildfires encroaching on human-inhabited areas, that resolution can be crucial.

In Los Angeles, "there are satellite observations, but it's very hard to determine. Is it my house that's on fire? Where exactly is this?" said WKID Solutions' Natasha Stavros, a wildfire analyst who also has worked at NASA.

"Some people stay because they don't really understand... that's where this idea [that] we need more observations available comes from."

Satellites tracking fires

The Palisades fire that started on January 7 on the hillsides near Los Angeles was first detected by two weather satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA reported January 13.

NOAA's GOES-16 and -18 satellites are hovering over the United States in geostationary orbit, capturing images of the land below every 10 minutes with its Advanced Baseline Imager, allowing them to see a fire very soon after it starts.

"Geostationary data, such as from GOES, is often used as a first, initial source for identifying fires because of its immediate availability," said Jenny Hewson, the outreach and implementation manager for NASA's Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for Earth observation project, which houses the agency's Fire Information Resource Management System (FIRMS).

But because the GOES satellites' spatial resolution is relatively low, at 2km per pixel, the level of detail they show is limited.

Other platforms -- such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Aqua and Terra satellites, and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on Suomi-NPP, NOAA 20 and NOAA 21 -- help provide more-detailed information that could be useful to firefighters on the ground.

"The infrared imagery collected by aircraft is typically about four meters' spatial resolution, and gathered overnight when it's cooler to get better discrimination between the background and where the fire is," said Brad Quayle, lead for the Disturbance Assessment and Services Program at the US Forest Service's Geospatial Technology and Applications Center.

"The imagery is then interpreted by image analysts to create tactical-scale fire maps to inform decisions and planning for how and where to use of suppression assets to fight the fire," he said.

FIRMS is also experimenting with computer modeling to more precisely estimate fire footprints, according to NASA.

'More fire than we know'

Brian Collins, director of Colorado-based nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance (EFA), plans a new low-orbit satellite "constellation" to complement existing resources.

It will sport a sensor with a resolution of five meters, much finer than that of ESA's current Sentinel-2 satellites, which can see objects only if they are at least 10 meters wide.

This means "we're going to learn very quickly that there is more fire on the Earth than we know about today; we're going to find very small fires," Collins predicted.

EFA aims to launch four satellites by the end of 2026, the first in just a few weeks, at a total cost of $53 million.

That figure is a "drop in the bucket" against the property damage and lives lost to wildfires, said Genevieve Biggs of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has financially supported EFA's satellite project.

It would take the whole planned swarm of 55 satellites, costing $400 million, to reach Collins's aim of imaging every point on Earth at least once every 20 minutes.

Dozens of satellites in orbit could "both detect and track fires... at a cadence that allows decisions to be made on the ground," Collins said.

Less grandiose efforts include Germany-based OroraTech, which has launched the first of at least 14 shoebox-sized FOREST-3 "nanosatellites."

The system will "deliver ultra-fast wildfire alerts and high-quality thermal data," Chief Executive Martin Langer said in a statement.

The Moore foundation is also backing a geostationary satellite project dubbed the Fire Urgency Estimator in Geostationary Orbit out of the University of California, Berkeley.

Working together

Additional data from all these new satellites would be "fantastic," ESA's Albergel said, but the large volume of information can prove problematic.

ESA's Sentinel-2 alone sends down one terabyte of data every single day.

Finding fire signs in such reams of data "is an excellent machine learning, artificial intelligence problem... the 'needle in the haystack,'" Collins said.

The data could ultimately help both predict new fire outbreaks and their progression, he added.

Looking ahead, Stavros said there was no "silver bullet" technology for wildfires.

"It's all of them working together" that will help emergency responders and slash risk from fire, Stavros said.

Beyond high-tech detection and tracking, the Moore Foundation's wildfire program also focuses on making communities more resilient and managing fire-prone ecosystems -- which can include "increasing ecologically beneficial fire while decreasing detrimental fire," Biggs said.