Scientists Fight Wild Fires from Space with Remarkable Success

While news are full with terrible fires in the Amazon and California, researchers have just announced surprising facts: the amount of land burned has been decreasing annually with a staggering drop of 25 percent between 2003 and 2019. One reason: Space technology.

Scientists have been working on monitoring fire for centuries, a critical endeavor that helps analyze and control the most fire-prone periods and zones.

The addition of satellites in the 1980s have allowed scientists to efficiently map fires over large areas globally. James Randerson, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, explains, “The pace of discovery has increased dramatically during the satellite era. Having high-quality, daily observations of fires available on a global scale has been critical.”

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers on NASA’s Aqua and Terra has revolutionized how fires are measured on Earth. The instrument, for example, would accurately detect around ten thousand fires on an average day in August – seventy percent happening in Africa – allowing the ability to prevent future potential fires in that time of year around the same areas.