15 - Guest lectures
ON-GOING WILDLAND FIRE WORK AT THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL OF CANADA WITH A FOCUS ON THE USE OF COTS RPAS FOR REDUCTION OF NON-FIRE PILOT WORKLOAD
G. Leblanc¹, G. Ifimov¹, M. Kalacska², O. Lucanus², J.P. Arroyo-Mora¹, J. Gorman¹, M. Wheatley, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, Canada; C. McFayden, Natural Resources Canada, Canada; ¹National Research Council of Canada (NRC), Canada ;²Applied Remote Sensing Laboratory, McGill University, Canada
The effective use of aircraft crew duty day is a major consideration for airborne asset operators including during disaster relief efforts. During wildfire operations, crew duty day is impacted by non-fire suppression activities, such as reconnaissance and intelligence gathering of the active fire and burned regions. The National Research Council of Canada and supporting partners, the Applied Remote Sensing Laboratory (McGill University), the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, and the Canadian Forest Service, have on-going collaborative activities to provide assessments of the utility of Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) for general non-fire suppression support to the wildfire management team. These areas of support include assessing active fire and smouldering detection distances and accuracies, nighttime RPAS visible and thermal IR-based intelligence gathering operations, general situational overview of the fire front and determining practical limitations with COTS RPAS in these environments. rnrnHere we present the on-going work, over the last 2 years of a multi-year effort to assess these fires using controlled fire experiments under various conditions, including under snow. Thermal imaging has been the primary tool for our work to date, however, we also include the use of 4K video, VisNIR (visible to near-infrared)_hyperspectral imaging and LiDAR pre/post burn assessments. To date, there have been effective detection distances of up to 9 km from a number of relatively small (~40 m x 10 m being the largest ) slash pile burns, as well as a high degree of active fire detection with a hyperspectral imager detecting a potassium emission feature in the radiance spectra – indicating high energies enough to allow for fire-induced emission to occur. Ground validation of fire intensity and temperatures were achieved by the simultaneous use of a FLIR thermal imager and in-situ temperature probes. The u