The Earth Fire Alliance has hired NASA’s Wildland Fire Program Manager Dr Michael Falkowski to be its first Lead Scientist.
Earth Fire Alliance is a global nonprofit coalition intent on delivering transformative data and insights from all wildfires around the world.
Dr Falkowski was NASA’s Program Manager for the Wildland Fire Program and led the FireSense project, overseeing an annual budget of around $20 million. In that role, he set strategic priorities for NASA’s wildland fire portfolio, led multidisciplinary teams, and spearheaded national and interagency efforts to advance fire science, data, and technology innovation.
As the alliance’s first Lead Scientist, Dr Falkowski will guide the ambitious research to operations strategy to address wildfire challenges on a global scale.
“I’m honored to join Earth Fire Alliance and contribute to its mission of transforming how the world understands and responds to wildfire,” said Dr Falkowski in a statement from the alliance.
“This is a unique opportunity to unite international science, space-based technology, and real-world operations to build wildfire resilience at the scale this accelerating global challenge demands.”
Dr Michael Falkowski leaves NASA to lead the Earth, Fire Alliance.
At NASA, Dr. Falkowski facilitated the development of wildland fire science and technology to drive actionable outcomes for fire management and resilience.
Before his time at NASA, Dr Falkowski worked in remote sensing and ecosystem science as a professor at Colorado State University, University of Minnesota, and Michigan Technological University. He also served as a wildland firefighter and state and tribal natural resource management specialist,
EFA Executive Director Brian Collins, in the alliance statement, said Dr Falkowski had a blend of scientific rigor and operational experience. “He brings a deep understanding of how to translate research into real-world impact—an essential quality as we scale the FireSat program, expand global partnerships, and deploy new programs.”
Through its FireSat program – a purpose-built satellite constellation designed to detect and monitor every wildfire on Earth in near real time – it aims to deliver unprecedented insights into wildfire behavior and impacts.
Carsten Warneke with NOAA flies through wildfire columns in a converted DC-8. On purpose. As reported by Devin Farmiloe in SLATE Magazine, Warneke is a research physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who investigates wildfires and their effects on air quality. He collects for analysis air samples over a live wildfire and its smoke columns, including in a DC-8 over the 2019 Williams Flats Fire, which burned more than 5,000 acres in northeastern Washington.
“We knew what was coming when we saw the monster of a plume,” remembers Warneke. “It was so much bigger than anything else we had seen. But we are scientists, so we were geeking out. The excitement for measuring such a large plume trumped everything.”
He said they decided to measure as close to the fire as possible to get emissions, and then follow the plume downwind to see how those emissions changed. The plume was 20,000 to 25,000 feet, so they decided to fly it at about 1,000 feet below the top of the plume. “You can’t fly directly over the fire, because the updraft is so large it would be extremely dangerous,” he explained. “In a fire that size, there are pieces of branches and stuff going a couple thousand feet into the air, so we had to go higher up.”
There is about three years of planning that goes into these missions, and one of the last stages is to decide where the emissions measurement instruments are going to be secured in the aircraft, what its weight is, and whether the aircraft is able to carry out the campaign. An aircraft over a fire, Warneke says, “is about the worst environment you want to put your high-performing atmospheric instruments in. These instruments are like the Formula One race cars of atmospheric chemistry.”
Each one weighs a few hundred pounds and is about the size of a washer/dryer combo. “They have a lot going on,” explains Warneke, “a monitor, weird pumps, vacuum fittings, and so on. The window next to each of these instruments has been replaced with an aluminum plate that has a little wing on the outside of it, to be more aerodynamic and reduce drag. Within that little wing, we stick the tube to collect air samples. There is a first-class passenger seat next to each instrument for the scientist in charge of making it run properly.”
Warneke remembers in particular one FIREX flight through smoke in Montana, over a grass fire that had already been contained. Smoke was still hanging on top, but the air was clear beneath it.
“There was still a little residual heat,” he says, “and we flew through it at maybe 10,000 feet. As we went through the smoke, the updraft was still so strong that the plane jumped up 100 meters within a couple of seconds. At that moment, I was standing in the cabin, and it bumped me up and I levitated for a second before we bumped down on the other side. At that moment, everyone went silent over the headsets, then a minute later the pilot said, ‘If we do this again, let’s make sure we have seatbelt signs on.'”
“We did the FIREX campaign in 2019, which was one of the lowest fire years we have had in a decade now, but wildfires have been recurring for years and years, and the impacts will stay with us for decades to come,” says Warneke. “Researching wildfires will continue to be important to our lab, especially since our largest air-quality-exceedance days happen with wildfire smoke.”
The Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) campaign was a NOAA/NASA interagency intensive study of North American fires to understand the integrated impact of fire emissions on the tropospheric chemistry and composition and to assess the satellite’s capability for detecting fires and estimating fire emissions.
The overarching goal of FIREX-AQ was to provide measurements of trace gas and aerosol emissions for wildfires and prescribed fires in great detail, relate them to fuel and fire conditions at the point of emission, characterize the conditions relating to plume rise, and follow plumes downwind to understand chemical transformation and air quality impacts.
NASA DC8 over the Brooks Range 01 Photo by D. Lack
Completed during summer 2019, FIREX-AQ combined instrumented aircraft, satellites, and ground-based instrumentation. Detailed fire plume sampling was carried out by the NASA DC-8 aircraft, which had a comprehensive instrument payload capable of measuring over 200 trace gas species, as well as aerosol microphysical, optical, and chemical properties.
The DC-8 completed 23 science flights, including 15 flights from Boise and 8 flights from Salina, Kansas. NASA’s ER-2 completed 11 flights, partially in support of the FIREX-AQ effort. The ER-2 payload was made up of 8 satellite analog instruments and provided critical fire information, including fire temperature, fire plume heights, and vegetation/soil albedo information. NOAA provided the NOAA-CHEM Twin Otter and the NOAA-MET Twin Otter aircraft to measure chemical processing in the lofted plumes of Western wildfires.
One of NOAA’s Twin Otters
The NOAA-CHEM Twin Otter focused on nighttime plume chemistry, from which data is archived at the NASA Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC). The NOAA-MET Twin Otter collected measurements of air movements at fire boundaries with the goal of understanding the local weather impacts of fires and the movement patterns of fires. Additionally, a ground-based station in McCall and several mobile laboratories provided in-situ measurements of aerosol microphysical and optical properties, aerosol chemical compositions, and trace gas species.
Over 18 million hectares (more than 44 million acres, roughly the size of North Dakota), were burned during Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season this year, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC). Canada usually sees only 2.5 million hectares burn annually. Although the number of fires that burned this year isn’t unusual — 6,595 as of October — many of the fires that did burn spread to “megafire” status.
Newly released NASA satellite imagery shows the day-by-day expansion of some of these megafires. The year’s second-largest fire burned 1,224,938 hectares (4,730 square miles) southeast of Sakami in Quebec; it was fully contained in late July.
NASA satellite imagery also shows the spread of four wildfires in and south of the Northwest Territories. The western-most fire, burning near Fort Nelson, stopped spreading in August after burning 802,575 hectares. It then was reignited by winds in late September and early October and spread to 1,294,096 hectares, becoming the state’s largest wildfire as of November 4. The animation details the fire’s first spread.
Scientists tracked the fires with the new “Fire Events Data Suite” (FEDS), which draws on data from a group of satellites called VIIRS. “The thing that really sets FEDS apart is that the system excels at tracking the daily, incremental spread of fires at 12-hour intervals,” said Yang Chen, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “That makes near real-time monitoring possible and allows us to generate much more detailed views of fire progression than we have been able to do in the past.”
The new system will reportedly help fire crews pinpoint the parts of a fire perimeter that are actively burning and identify residual heat from the fire that may pose a hazard to wildland firefighters.
In this video that NASA published today the agency explains their role in working with the U.S. Forest Service in developing a fire shelter that would hopefully increase the survival chances of a wildland firefighter entrapped in a vegetation fire. NASA is looking at materials they have used or plan to use on spacecraft that could reflect heat, provide some insulation from the outside temperatures which can exceed 2,000 degrees F, is thin and flexible enough to be folded and easily carried, is durable enough to be carried by tactical athletes for years, and weighs less than five pounds. That’s tough criteria.
They have been working on this for about a year, which we have covered here and here. When I saw that they had just published this video, I assumed they would report on their progress, saying perhaps that they had selected a new very promising space age material and would be make a bunch of prototypes for rigorous testing. But no. In the five-minute video they simply say they are looking at materials.
Maybe I’m naive, thinking that when the vast resources of NASA are used to design a fairly straightforward product with no circuit boards or interplanetary radios, after a year their scientists could report at least SOME progress.
The video simply stops after five minutes and 18 seconds. There is no conclusion, no timetable is laid out, and there is no cause for celebration or hope. The video just ends. Like the final episode of The Sopranos.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to launch a network of 200 small satellites that will detect wildfires within 15 minutes after a blaze grows to be at least 35 to 50 feet across. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is working on a concept for a network of space-based sensors called FireSat in collaboration with Quadra Pi R2E. Within three minutes of detecting a fire from orbit, FireSat would notify emergency responders in the area of the fire.
Robert Staehle, lead designer of FireSat at JPL, and his team first presented the concept of FireSat in 2011 to the joint NASA/U.S. Forest Service Tactical Fire Remote Sensing Advisory Committee. They spent the subsequent years refining their understanding of fire monitoring needs and technological requirements.
“Such a system has only now become feasible at a reasonable cost, enabled by advances in commercial microelectronics that NASA, JPL and universities have tested in space via CubeSat experiments, and by software technology originally developed to give Mars rovers and Earth orbiters more autonomy in their science observations,” Staehle said.
This sounds like science fiction, but launches should begin in 2017 with a fully operational system of FireSat sensors in space by June of 2018.
CubeSats are 4 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches and weigh about 3 pounds. They are generally built from off the shelf components at a cost of thousands rather than millions of dollars.
