During the last five years, the Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership, led by PI Vince Ambrosia of NASA Ames Research Center, has developed extensive capabilities for real-time remote sensing of Wildland fire using an unmanned aircraft system (UAS).  The NASA Ikhana UAS carries the Autonomous Modular Sensor payload which consists of a two channel thermal and ten channel multispectral sensors.  Capabilities include onboard processing and satcom.

The Ames team and collaborators received the Ames Honor Award on October 14th, 2009.  As a long-time collaborator with the team, Robert Sohlberg from the UMD Geography Department was one of the recipients.  One major reason for the award was the WRAP team’s support of CalFIRE incident command teams during the California firestorms of June and July, 2008.

The UMD contribution included provision of MODIS fire detections via direct broadcast to the USDA Forest Service, which were used for targeting the finer resolution acquisitions by the UAS.  Sohlberg is also part of a NASA Advanced Information Systems Technology project with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to develop SensorWeb technologies which use in situ, aircraft and satellite assets in a coordinated fashion to meet science and application data requirements.  The SensorWeb team collaborated with the WRAP team in experiments which used the MODIS instrument to direct the EO-1 satellite which in turn used its results to task the UAS in flight.  Conversely, fire data produced by the UAS was in turn used to task EO-1 within one orbit.