> **Case Example:** Florida Fires - "Satellites hottest idea in battling
> wildfires," by Robert Lee Hotz, *Los Angeles Times*, July 18, 1998.
>
> Oceanographer Gene Carl Feldman was in a planning meeting at the
> Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland when firefighters in Florida
> unexpectedly telephoned. He could barely hear their question over the
> hoarse shouts, ringing phones and confusion at the other end of the
> line. After battling flames, smoke and infernal heat for two weeks,
> they were desperate for a better view of the wildfires along a
> 125-mile corridor from Jacksonville to Cocoa Beach. As a last resort,
> they called Feldman, who manages data gathered for NASA by a
> commercial ocean surveillance satellite.
>
> Even as they spoke, the satellite's wide-angle sensor -- programmed to
> take color images every day of plankton blooms, red tides, migrating
> schools of fish and other sea feathers -- was already scanning the
> Florida coastline automatically.
>
> Within 15 minutes, Feldman had the satellite image on his computer
> screen. He swore in amazement. "The whole East Coast of Florida was
> one line of fires, blanketed in this pall of smoke," he said. Within
> an hour, the satellite image had been transmitted electronically to
> the emergency management center in Brevard County, where the
> firefighters for the first time could see the true scope of what they
> were up against.
>
> Designed originally to monitor seasonal environmental conditions,
> track the daily weather or monitor ocean conditions, these sensors are
> also giving emergency planners an unexpected vantage point on large
> fires. Often scanning the entire globe every 24 hours, the satellites
> are able to watch a world of fire, from out of control agricultural
> fires in Indonesia and Central America to wildfires in densely settled
> Florida or across the trackless Yukon.
>
> Scientists have a keen interest in the smoke particles arising from
> large fires like those still smoldering in Mexico, because smoke
> contributes to overall global pollution levels and affects the quality
> of air people breathe. The use of satellites as fire spotters is so
> new that researchers are still working to understand how the various
> kinds of images can be most useful. No single satellite, however,
> offers firefighters a complete picture of a wildfire. Each sensor
> measures the effects of a large fire in a slightly different way.
> Scientists from NOAA and NASA state that each sensor has its strengths
> and its shortcomings:
>
> • Peering into the infrared, sensors aboard the GOES-8 weather
> satellite can spot the thermal bloom of large wildfires that encompass
> many square miles or that spark into like far from any human
> observers. Researchers compare different infrared wavelengths to tell
> the difference between territory that looks warm because the sun
> heated it and the spots caused by lava flows or brush fires.
>
> • Attuned to tiny particles in the atmosphere, a NASA sensor called
> the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer can detect the amount of smoke in
> the atmosphere every day anywhere in the world. Earlier this year, the
> sensor tracked the huge smoke plumes from fires in Mexico extending as
> much as two miles up into the atmosphere as they drifted across
> California, Texas, Florida, Wisconsin and north into Canada.
>
> • Calibrated for the visible and near-infrared spectrum, the wide
> angle SewWiFS sensor aboard the OrbView-2 satellite, operated by
> Orbital Imaging Corp., can produce sharp images of fire fronts too
> large to be encompassed from the ground. Feldman used it to help the
> Florida firefighters. During the fires that raged in Indonesia earlier
> this year, researchers used it to monitor smoke plumes that enveloped
> much of the South Pacific.
>
> Some orbital sensors can penetrate the cloud cover that on occasion
> may mask a serious. And the view from the fire tower of space is about
> to get even better. Two commercial earth-observation satellites, with
> sensors that should vastly expand the ability to monitor wildfires
> from orbit, are being readied for launch in 1999 and 2000 by Orbital
> Space Systems Group in Germantown, Md.
>
> In the meantime, Jay R. Herman at NASA's Goddard Center, who handles
> much of the data from the ozone spectrometer sensor, said he too is
> starting to get calls from curious forest rangers and firefighters.
> They want to know what the sensor, which offers a view of Earth
> through the ultraviolet spectrum can add to the understanding of a
> wildfire.
>
> Unlike other satellite sensors that rely on visible wavelengths, the
> ozone spectrometer sensor can unmistakable sort clouds from smoke by
> comparing different wave lengths of ultraviolet light, Herman said.
> "With TOMS, the smoke signal just pops up," Herman said. "If you look
> at a global image for TOMS, you can always know whether you are
> looking at smoke, dust or clouds."