Title: Improving near real-time thermal and gas emission retrievals from wildland fires
Presenting Author: James Thompson
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin
Co-Author(s): Michael Ramsey, Joseph White, Jean-Francois Smekens, and Carl Schwope

Abstract:
The number, size, and severity of wildland fires have increased dramatically every year over the previous decades. Fires evolve quickly, injecting heat, gases, and particulate matter into the ecosystem. High resolution multispectral TIR data of an entire wildfire can aid in active fire detection, behavior evaluation, and plume characterization, all of which are vital for fire managers. MIIF, the Multi-spectral Infrared Imager for wildland Fires, instrument is the first low-SWaP (less than 0.35 kg and 15W) and low-cost multispectral TIR imaging system for active wildland and prescribed fires deployable on small UAV platforms. MIIF includes onboard computational power and digital radio-frequency/cellular communication protocols to process and distribute data to fire management systems with low latency. The architecture of MIIF is designed to provide high fidelity, low latency actionable data to fire managers and responders providing detailed information about fire location and changes in fire behavior. The flexibility in observation geometries possible from UAVs, along with the optimization of retrieval algorithms, will allow the 3D derivation of thermal and gas (i.e., SO2, CO2, and NH3) flux rates critical for understand fire dynamics and impacts on ecosystems. Linking fire intensity and efficiency to biomass burn and vegetation change, provides improved forecasting of gas emissions from prescribed burns and wildland fires of all sizes to evaluate the effect on air quality. Air quality predictions are especially important near metropolitan areas where prescribed burning is important for long-term risk reduction and ecosystem management but are restricted by air quality standards. Ultimately, the insights gleaned from MIIF will improve the identification of fire behavior, thermal and gas emissions, and the impacts on ecosystems.