WildFireSat: Enhancing Canada's ability to manage wildfires

A Canadian challenge

Canada has 367 million hectares of forest, or 9% of the world's forest and 25% of the world's boreal forest, and is home to some of the largest and most intense wildfires in the world. Between 2013 and 2022, Canada saw an annual average of about 5,600 wildfires burn over 2 million hectares of forest.

The 2023 fire season was exceptional, with approximately 15 million hectares burned, which is about 7 times the annual average. These exceptional fire seasons are unfortunately expected to become more and more normal.

The amount of forest burned by wildfire is projected to double by 2050 due to our changing climate, which is causing longer wildfire seasons, more extreme weather conditions and increased droughts.

Only 3% of all wildland fires that start each year in Canada grow to more than 200 hectares in area. However, these fires account for 97% of the total area burned across the country. By increasing our capabilities to better anticipate which wildfires have the potential to burn out of control, they can be prioritized for suppression, leading to a drastic reduction in the economic losses related to wildfire.

Canada's cost of fighting wildfires

Canada spends about $1 billion annually combatting wildfires, and the cost for the 2023 season is expected to be more than double that amount. However, the indirect costs of wildfires may rise to several billion dollars per year when considering property loss, damaged infrastructure, industrial shutdowns, evacuations, health-related expenses, and economic losses in a variety of sectors including tourism, forestry, and energy. The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire was the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, with a total cost of approximately $9 billion.

The WildFireSat mission

The planned WildFireSat mission aims to monitor all active wildfires in Canada from space on a daily basis. It is an initiative of:

• the CSA
• the CFS and the Canadian Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO), both part of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)
• Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)

The primary goal of WildFireSat is to support wildfire management. In addition, it will provide Canadians with more precise information on smoke and air quality conditions. It will further enable us to more accurately measure the carbon emitted by wildfires, an important requirement of international agreements on carbon reporting.

A Canadian initiative

Canada is a world leader in wildfire management and research. Canadian wildfire managers are working to address the challenges of increased wildfire activity through modernization of their tools and policies. Current remote sensing tools are not adequate to obtain the data that wildfire managers need to carry out their challenging tasks. Innovative Canadian technology is now available to build an affordable space solution to provide wildfire managers with the tools they require.

In a country as vast as Canada, observation from space is the only way to get information on all active wildfires, every day, with the precision that wildfire managers need to do their job effectively. WildFireSat will give us a complete inventory of wildfire activity in Canada at a crucial time of the day and a better understanding of how fire changes across different provinces and territories from year to year.

WildFireSat will benefit Canadians

WildFireSat will reduce wildfire losses through more precise wildfire monitoring, improving our ability to make informed decisions about defending communities and avoiding unnecessary evacuations. The intelligence provided by WildFireSat will allow us to better protect our resources, infrastructure, and environment by providing better situational awareness, particularly near inhabited areas. It will help reduce health problems associated with smoke and air pollution. It will assist in preventing disastrous wildfires through improved decision making. The WildFireSat mission will solidify Canada as a world leader in wildfire management and research and in the deployment of breakthrough wildfire management technology in space.

The North

Wildfires in Canada are managed in different ways depending on how close they are to people, infrastructure, or cultural and economically valuable locations. In northern Canada where population is sparse, wildfires are often left to burn, performing their natural function of regenerating these ecosystems. These remote wildfires need to be watched closely (often by aircraft) to ensure they are not approaching vulnerable areas. Since the North is vast, it is not always possible to efficiently monitor fires with aircraft, especially when there are many fires spread across great distances. WildFireSat will allow wildfire managers to stay better informed about the status of wildfires in the North, reducing the need for aircraft monitoring.

What WildFireSat will measure

The WildFireSat system will consist of satellites equipped with infrared sensors that will measure the radiative heat power emitted by wildfires, referred to as Fire Radiative Power (FRP). With FRP information, essential characteristics of wildfires such as fire intensity and rate of spread can be derived. It will also give us accurate data on carbon emission from wildfires.

Improved wildfire management

On any given day with significant wildfire activity, hundreds of wildfires can be burning in one province or territory at the same time. With limited resources available for wildfire suppression, wildfires must often be prioritized, with only the most critical ones being fought. The measurements taken by WildFireSat, together with other information such as wind direction, topography, and dryness of the area, will give wildfire managers the ability to determine which wildfires have the highest risk and should therefore be prioritized. Moreover, the mission will provide this crucial wildfire intelligence to wildfire managers in near real time.

Accurate smoke forecasting

Smoke from wildfires can travel great distances and severely degrade air quality. The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire affected air quality for a large area that stretched all the way to Florida. More recently, smoke from the widespread 2023 Canadian wildfires caused unprecedented levels of air quality degradation for several cities in the eastern part of Canada and the United States.

WildFireSat will help provide more accurate data on the smoke coming from wildfires, allowing improved smoke forecasts for organizations and citizens that need the information.

Air quality forecasting

ECCC produces daily forecasts of the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI), a scale designed to help Canadians adjust their activity levels depending on their individual health risk from air pollution. Since wildfires are often responsible for reduced air quality, it is necessary to collect better data on wildfires in order to improve the accuracy of the AQHI and other air quality advisories. WildFireSat will offer more precise and timely monitoring of wildfires and their characteristics, as well as further refinement of remote sensing algorithms.

Carbon emission monitoring

A recent estimate suggests that in British Columbia in 2017, emissions directly resulting from wildfires amounted to 150 million tons of carbon dioxide. That is two to three times the emissions from fossil fuel burning and other activities in all categories of that province's greenhouse gas inventory. In Canada, annual carbon emissions from wildfires can equal the annual carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels across the country.

With the information on FRP from WildFireSat, we will be able to calculate how much carbon is released into the atmosphere by wildfire. This data is essential for carbon emission reporting as agreed upon under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Gap in wildfire observations from space

Existing satellites with infrared sensors can observe wildfires. However, for a period of several hours in the afternoon and early evening, none of the required satellite images are currently available. This long blackout period corresponds to the most critical period of wildfire activity, i.e. the late afternoon "peak burn period." During that period, higher daily temperatures, lower humidity and strong winds often result in a rapid propagation of wildfires. WildFireSat aims to fill that crucial gap by taking measurements during the daily peak burn period.

Additionally, the WildFireSat mission will combine data from the WildFireSat satellites themselves with publicly available data from existing satellites.

Principal investigator

Dr. Josh Johnston is the principal investigator of the WildFireSat mission. Josh is a forest fire research scientist with NRCan's CFS, and was formerly a firefighter. His research focuses on the development of remote sensing tools for studying the physical properties of combustion and fire behaviour, as well as the adaptation of remote sensing tools for operational wildfire management. Josh has been collaborating with the CSA since 2013 on activities leading up to the realization of WildFireSat.

Scientific objective

WildFireSat will support research on the behaviour of wildfires and the emission of carbon, aerosols and other particles that wildfires produce. By providing a key observation of wildfire activity and FRP during the peak burn period, WildFireSat will work with existing satellites to significantly broaden our understanding of how wildfires behave and how that behaviour is changing alongside our changing climate.

Uncooled infrared sensors

WildFireSat will use infrared sensors to measure the radiant heat energy coming from wildfires. Normally, infrared sensors must be cooled down to extremely low temperatures using heavy cooling equipment with high energy demands. A satellite with such equipment is very large and expensive. One of the unique things about WildFireSat is that it will use an innovative type of infrared sensor, based on microbolometer technology, that does not need to be cooled. The CSA has invested in the development of this technology in recent years through its Space Technology Development Program. The use of this technology drastically reduces the weight and size of the satellite and the amount of power required to operate it, thereby considerably reducing the cost of the satellite.

WildFireSat data publicly available

All processed and calibrated WildFireSat data collected over Canada will be accessible to the public as soon as it becomes available, in accordance with the CSA's commitment to open government. Downstream WildFireSat operational products will be made available to trained end-users (i.e. Canadian emergency management personnel) and the public as quickly as possible.

Future possibilities beyond WildFireSat

With multiple sensors in space, we would be able to observe wildfires more frequently, giving wildfire managers updates on all of Canada daily or even multiple times throughout the day. This type of very frequent monitoring would be unrealistic with the traditional type of cooled infrared sensors but is a possibility with uncooled infrared sensors. Because of their limited physical resource requirements, WildFireSat's uncooled infrared sensors would make an excellent addition to the satellites of tomorrow.

Watch the NRCan video WildFireSat, a mission tailored to the needs of wildland fire management in Canada to learn more about how wildfires are managed in Canada.

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