NASA Aircraft Captures Rare Infrared Views of Utah Wildfire

A NASA high-altitude research plane has provided striking new views of the Monroe Canyon fire in Utah, offering scientists rare data on how wildfires burn and spread.

Flying at 65,000 feet, NASA’s ER-2 aircraft collected detailed imagery over southern Utah as part of its Geological Earth Mapping Experiment (GEMx), a joint effort with the U.S. Geological Survey. NASA.gov shared recently that the mission’s primary goal is to map mineral deposits across the western United States, but when the Monroe Canyon and Dragon Bravo fires flared up in late July, researchers seized an opportunity to study fire behavior as well.

“We’ve been working together closely for the past year to understand the capabilities of each mission and to determine how we can aid each other,” Kevin Reath said, deputy program manager for GEMx.

One of the ER-2’s instruments, the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator, recorded natural-color and infrared images of the Monroe Canyon fire on July 30. The false-color images revealed active flames, smoldering areas and recently burned ground that would be invisible to the naked eye through dense smoke.

“Knowing how hot a fire is can tell you how high the smoke can go, how fast the fire can move, and how big it can be,” Jacquelyn Shuman said, a forest ecologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and project scientist for FireSense, another NASA program that supports wildfire management.

The flights showed the fire intensifying throughout the day as wind gusts reached 58 kilometers per hour and humidity dropped to 5 percent. Later in the afternoon, scientists observed pyrocumulus clouds rising above the fire, a phenomenon linked to especially strong heat and updrafts.

Dave Peterson, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and principal investigator of the INSPYRE mission, said data from the ER-2 could help determine what fire conditions lead to pyrocumulonimbus clouds, massive storm-like formations that can inject smoke into the stratosphere. “It’s commonly assumed that fires triggering pyroCb development are large and intense,” Peterson said. “But we still don’t know: How large? How intense?”

In addition to fire science, GEMx researchers hope the data will shed light on how fires alter the mineral makeup of landscapes, improving U.S. Geological Survey mapping efforts.

Reath said the collaboration between GEMx and FireSense has been a breakthrough. “This will likely be the best imagery of naturally caused wildfires we have to date,” he said, calling it a success for both missions.