UC Berkeley proposes forest fire satellite
UC Berkeley proposes forest fire satellite
22 October 2013
published by www.bizjournals.com
USA — Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley want to use a satellite to watch for wildfires in the western United States.
Such a device is a far cry from the old watch towers in the forests where people scan the horizon for smoke all summer.
But the principle is the same a high vantage point.
Cal researchers Scott Stephens, Carl Pennypacker, Maggi Kelly and others have proposed a satellite in geosynchronous orbit (meaning it would orbit above a fixed point on the earth’s surface) that could watch the western states all the time, photographing the region below every few seconds to look for “hot spots.”
Such a satellite, which the team has given the unwieldy name of “Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit,” or FUEGO, wouldn’t be cheap, likely costing “several hundred million dollars.” But it could save lots of money by making firefighting more efficient. And the United States spends some $2.5 billion a year on firefighting, a number that has soared since 1995, when it was about $300 million. A lot of that, Stephens said, is because there are more buildings now in forest areas, and more must be spent to defend them when fires break out.
“If we had information on the location of fires when they were smaller, then we could take appropriate actions quicker,” said Stephens, a fire expert in UC Berkeley’s environmental science department. He lost about 400 research plots in the Sierras during the Rim Fire around Yosemite late this summer.
Stephens, who advocates policy changes to allow some fires to burn for the health of forests, which need periodic thinning, wouldn’t want a satellite system to simply be used to increase suppression of all wildfires, even though that would be easier with the technology.
“I think the system could make it easier to manage all fire, including the ones that we want to burn,” he said. “If the new system would allow better information on all fires, I think it could help suppression and fire management.”
Pennypacker, a physicist who works at the Space Sciences Laboratory on the hill above campus and also at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory further up the hill, said such a satellite might have spotted the awful 1991 Oakland Hills fire that burned 3,000 homes, and allowed it to be put out earlier.
Most wildfires today are still spotted, one way or another, by people, said Stephens. He thinks it’s time to change that and stop depending on centuries-old fire towers and human eyeballs.
