Satellites carrying infrared equipment able to detect fires
Modern infrared equipment used on various spacecrafts allows to see even a small campfire from the orbit, but it would be madness to provide such information to fire fighting divisions of the Emergency Ministry. They would be flooded with alarm signals and stop responding to them eventually.
That is why the Emergency Ministry requesting the Geoinformational Systems enterprise of the National Academy of Sciences to develop a tool for remote fire detection asked to make it with low resolution. It needed to fix and identify the coordinates of only high temperature anomalies prompting that there is a fire.
“If convert this request to the specifications format, it was required to use a resolution of one kilometer per pixel,” explains one of the project managers, Dmitry Novikov, senior software engineer at the innovations department of Geoinformational Systems. “This does not mean that you can onle detect a fire with an area of one kilometer. A satellite with infrared equipment is able to detect an intense fire with a diameter of 20 meters. Meanwhile, a campfire cannot be seen from the space, which is fine for firefighters. Using these characteristics was convenient for us. When we received an order from the Emergency Ministry, we had an array of satellite images, both infrared and in visible spectrum with a similar resolution. We created a large database of temperature anomalies confirming that in each particular case images portrayed fires, not accidental heating of the soil in the sun.
The new fire detection system is designed for processing of images obtained by NOAA and TERRA satellite series as well as by the first Belarusian satellite that was put into the orbit recently. An experimental copy of the device has been already submitted to the Emergency Ministry where it is being tested today.
The system is also able to detect floods and spates thus enabling relevant agencies to assess the risks properly and to make decisions quickly.
