Wildfires are on the rise, all around the world: more frequent, even in the winter (in California and even in French Brittany last week) they now also come in the form of megafires, especially in countries like the US and Australia. Fueled by climate change and urbanization, we need to get used to these changes as they will last.
And the space industry has been quick to react, proposing various services to support firefighters, from fire detection to burnt area assessment. Several large size projects are existing or under development to address this problem.
Existing institutional systems support fire monitoring since years now. For example, the European Copernicus EMS (Emergency Management Service) provides free risk maps and damage assessments. Copernicus is used in almost any forest fire situation by all European firefighters.
Eumetsat also provides fire detectionvia its SEVERI instrument. As satellites are in GEO orbit, that offer a tempral resolution of 15 min but a spatial resolution of only 3km which is not effective for small fire or just fire starts.
The US the GOES-R satellite has a similar feature with its ability to detect heat signatures and it has been in operations for many years, providing early detection for large fires, which is valuable in North America.
But today, this activity is attracting newspace startups as this is seen as a growing business opportunity.
US space company Muon Space has announced last year the launch with EFA (Earth Fire Alliance) of the Firesat constellation that will carry a 6-band multispectral infrared (IR) instrument that will give firefighters data on the fire during its whole lifecycle. Firesat should be able to detect small fires (5x5m) With 52 birds, starting in 2026, Firesat should provide a 20 minutes revisit. The company just launched its first demonstration satellite and the project is supported by Google and diverse NGOs.
In Europe, German based Ororatech is proposing similar services; WIth 8 satellites just launched and 8 more to come before the end of the year, the company plans to grow its constellation to around 80 satellites, offering 48 daily scans. Services include risk assessment, early detection, near-real time monitoring and damage analysis in a fashion similar to Firesat.
In the USA again, popular weather app company Myradar just raised more than $7M to launch a constellation of LEO satellite carrying visible, thermal, and hyperspectral sensors to provide disaster monitoring as well as Wildfire Detection & Mitigation. The plan is to have 150 satellites and the first two are planned in june 2025.
However, EO is not the only role satellites can play for wildfire fighting. Firefighters also rely on ground sensors, like cameras and more and more on large networks of cheap IoT sensors that can detect smoke, heat or identify fire starts thanks to IA. Satellite IoT operators like Kineis and Echostar are very active in this field and hope to deploy large flocks of sensors.
Like GHG detection, satellite Fire detection reflects a trend in newspace: dedicated constellations for a specific market segment/application, made possible by reduced costs to develop, launch and operate satellite constellations. Whether they will be commercially successfull remains to be seen, but these project demonstrate again the usefullness of satellites to protect our planet.
