“Ensuring the new technology is easily adoptable by operational agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and the National Weather Service was a primary goal of the Montana campaign,” said Jacquelyn Shuman, FireSense project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

To that end, the Alta X drone was chosen for sensor integration by the team because the U.S. Forest Service currently has a fleet of the drones, as well as trained drone pilots.

“Anemometers are everywhere, but are usually stationary,” said Robert McSwain, FireSense UAS lead, based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “We are taking a sensor type that is already used all over the world, and giving it wings.”

The two sensors mounted on the NASA Alta X to hopefully better predict fire and smoke behaviorsare a radiosonde (left) and an anemometer (right). Photo courtesy of NASA.

Drones offer valuable fire-control data, because they can be flown to continue updating measurements over a precise location as conditions change. Fire fighters on the ground can use this real-time information to make quick decisions about where to send resources.

“Drones are not meant to replace the weather balloons,” said Jennifer Fowler, FireSense’s project manager at Langley. “A weather balloon is going to be a one-off, and the attached sensor won’t be recovered. The instrumented drone, on the other hand, can be flown repeatedly. The goal is to create a drop-in solution to get more frequent, localized data for wildfires—not to replace all weather forecasting.”