Using one of the company's altitude controlled, zero pressure and fully reusable balloons, the team used Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR) bands to capture high resolution images of the wildfire west of Loveland.
The sensor on the balloon is a LWIR camera, which can pierce through smoke from an elevation of between 50,000 and 70,000 feet and transmit data back to a ground crew the surface temperatures in and around the fire.
As irony might have it, Urban Sky already had several systems prepared for a separate project scheduled in August doing fire scans before the Alexander Mountain fire began.
"We had built several of the sensing systems up and we just needed to do final flight testing with them, and we were really hoping to have an opportunity to get one (balloon) over a real fire and do calibrations over a fire at fire temperatures," Urban Sky co-founder and Chief Technical Officer Jared Leidich said.
The Alexander Mountain fire allowed the Urban Sky team to collect data from the wildfire and give the team information that, according to Leidich, could validate near-real time fire data against satellite data of the fire — which can be between 12-48 hours old.
"For this fire this past week, we were not integrated with any wildland fire managers or firefighters, this was an R&D flight," Urban Sky co-founder and CEO Andrew Antonio said. "We were unsure whether it (the balloon) would work or how it would work and it was pretty successful, but unfortunately the data was not leveraged by the fire community this time around. But we now have a level of confidence in the system it can be moved forward."
With the success of the data collection over the Alexander Mountain fire, Urban Sky now has valuable data to build from.
According to Antonio, part of the reason for all their recent work is that Urban Sky recently won a three-year grant from NASA to improve the wildfire monitoring system, with a goal of incorporating the balloon system into some airborne fire campaigns.
"We're working hand-in-hand with NASA to get it integrated into a real fire campaign so it can useful to first responders," Antonio said.
The NASA Earth Sciences and Technology Office laid out several projects for new monitoring and sensing technologies for wildfires, and Urban Sky went in on the application process and came out with success.
"We proposed to the grants and won, and that gives us the opportunity to join in on the NASA FireSense campaign," Leidich said. "There are several different companies providing different types of technologies, but we are going in with systems to try and sense wildfires and deliver the data in real time, showing off the capability."
Six valuable takeaways from the balloon's applications:
- One, the balloons can image at scanning rates similar to satellites (very broad-area scanning), but can image in higher resolution due to the balloons being much closer to Earth (50,000 to 70,000 feet).
- Two, the advantage of the balloons moving slowly allows the balloons to "park themselves" over fires for a long period of time collecting data for transmission back to the ground for analysis in near real time.
- Three, during pre-fire phases, parts of Urban Sky's project's products can focus on vegetation health, which can determine if a forest that might look 'green' is actually in a state, or not in a state, where it could or would burn.
- Four, because the balloons fly high enough above wildfires, they do not interfere with commercial airlines or low-flying, wildfire aircraft and firefighters on the ground.
- Five, the balloons can carry several types of remote sensor equipment, such as RGB imagers, which can scan the landscape post-fire and look at the burn scars for signs of possible land, mud and rock slides, unstable slopes that could move over roads or into communities below, and if trees are standing or not.
- Six, each balloon can be launched by a single person, from the back of a pickup truck in approximately 10 minutes and takes approximately one hour to reach altitude.
Leidich said their balloons were used over a New Mexico wildfire in 2023 as well, and in both fire's cases, each fire had progressed passed the point it was said to have been in all public-facing maps.
Subsequently, Urban Sky learned from both fires that their data was, "brand new and much newer than the other (satellite) data," meaning the fires had progressed further than what the general public was seeing on a map, but also showed the balloon system data could be used more significantly in fighting the potential spread of a fire because the data is very close to being in real time.
In the case of the Alexander Mountain fire, the team was able to launch two balloons over the fire and follow the wind layers with some control, scan the fire, collect data and land safely.
"We were able to fly over the fire, turn the balloon around, fly over the fire again, and turn the balloon around again and get out of there," Leidich said.
Leidich said the sensors being carried by the balloons were looking for temperature variations on the ground.
"This thing in the image is this temperature. And when we are in fire areas, if you have a relatively accurate fire temperature, you can get a lot of information not possible to get from a visual image," he said. "Our instrument will say 'yes, there is a fire, and it is intense and very likely to spread'."
WHAT'S NEXT GOING FORWARD?
Urban Sky sees applicability in both a need for high resolution images and broad-area scans when dealing with and fighting wildfires. That will be more in the early detection phase rather than the mapping phase, according to Leidich.
"Because you don't know where the fire is in the early detection phase, you're trying to see if a fire started and functionally those areas are too big for piloted airplanes," he said. "Airplanes with thermal sensors are too expensive and can't scan enough area at once, but satellites are too low resolution with a 300 meter pixel you can have 10 trees on fire and it's not enough heat for enough area to have the satellite able to register that as a fire."
The next generation of balloons Urban Sky wishes to develop will be able to spend weeks to months in the air — a sort of 'roving sentinel' balloon — looking for and monitoring areas of higher risk of fires among forests and grasslands in the West throughout the wildfire season.
"It starts to become economically practical to scan the entire West on a some-what regular, routine basis and have a good pulse on where fires are starting," Leidich said.
©2024 The Gazette, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
