With the intensity of natural disasters and severe weather accelerating amid global warming, governments – including Canada – are working to speed up the satellite information flow as best as possible to the people on the ground – sometimes, literally, the wildfire firefighters holding the hose against the flames.
This past week alone, wildfires in British Columbia, wildfires in Ontario and heatwaves across the country were among the immediate problems safety officials faced across Canada. Government officials worked hard to find time for brief SpaceQ interviews while British Columbia was under a province-wide state of emergency, causing neighbouring Alberta’s air quality to plummet due to the immense amount of smoke pouring into the sky.
Ashlin Richardson, a senior data scientist with the Province of British Columbia’s Wildfire Service, pointed to years of training that kicked in for her team in recent days to manage the flood of vital information coming to their desks, information that must be parsed quickly to manage firefighting and evacuations across the region.
“In my individual perspective in the data scientist role – participating in advanced European Space Agency training, working on open-source methods with Indian Institute of Technology, receiving co-authorship with a leading remote sensing expert, working with the Canadian Space Agency, Natural Resources Canada and Public Safety Canada to demonstrate a novel [satellite] acquisition over a significant disaster site, and working with firefighters – are some highlights of this year I’m grateful for,” Richardson said.
Richardson’s team said that collaboration is key to figuring out what to do during wildfires. The province’s network is broad, receiving satellite information in collaboration not only with government, but also with aerospace companies, information technology service providers, academic institutions and numerous partners at the regional, provincial and international levels.
Where possible, the province is also leveraging emerging technologies in things such as sensors that can penetrate the smoke and more easily detect the flames at an early stage, along with the backbone of traditional statistics, physical modeling and computing technologies that help with interpreting satellite information.
Assisting decision-makers swiftly
One common link in British Columbia’s chain of disaster management is Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), which assists in getting the right information to them quickly.
“Decision-making happens at different levels,” said Joshua Johnston, an NRCan forest fire research scientist, in an interview. “It happens on every single scale – from the fire crew on the line who are who are making a decision about where they’re going to point the nozzle, or where they’re going to carve a new line. It goes up to the people who are at the base camp directing multiple crews on the same fire, people coordinating the evacuation, or even regional, provincial and national response centers – and that’s just in the suppression world.”
NRCan has a Departmental Emergency Operation Centre that gets activated in cases of large national disaster, such as the ongoing forest fires. The centre’s role is to maintain the all-important “situational awareness” between federal departments that include, for example, RCMP officers helping to evacuate Indigenous groups.
To avoid information overwhelm, however, Johnston said it’s not only important to flow satellite data to the various fire managers, but also to determine to what level of detail they need.
“When we’re looking at decision making, it does not necessarily mean that the same quality of satellite data is applicable to every level, nor is that necessary,” he said. “If you’re a duty officer who’s looking at the entire province of Ontario, and you want to make sure you understand where you need to be moving the water bombers for tomorrow, it’s perfectly fine to have one-kilometer resolution maps of your fire activity on a coarse scale … but one-kilometer resolution does not help the [firefighter] crew leader who’s trying to find their way to the hotspot on the fire.”
The key, he said, is to provide satellite information at multiple scales, along with the agility to supplement the information with airborne scans to get the most up-to-date information in a local area regarding hotspots and growth.
Johnston is also principal investigator of WildFireSat, which is in development and due to launch in 2026 to monitor all active wildfires in Canada from space every day. He said having a dedicated sun-synchronous orbiting satellite watching the country will be a boon, because it will offer 400-meter resolution. That resolution is enough, he said, to “have a very strong sense of where all the fires are, how fast they’re moving, which direction they’re going, whether or not you can even suppress them, and where they’re going to be by the next by the next overpass.”
Satellite selection
Which satellite to use for a quickly evolving natural disaster is not as easy as one would think. The United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty that underlies much of the world’s law has language indicating that launching nations are responsible for their own vehicles and satellites (which also extends to companies performing services on behalf of governments.) Happily, though, the space world is not so siloed and finds ways to work together in times of need.
Canada has been collaborating with other countries for decades on all aspects of space exploration, including satellites. The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) pointed to tight integration with other Canadian government departments, too, to deliver the vital information quickly to decision-makers.
For the largest disasters, the Canadian government activates the International Charter “Space and Major Disasters”, which includes 17 charter members and 61 contributing satellites, according to CSA information. As of this article’s writing in late July, the last time Canada activated the charter was in April 2019, during severe spring flooding that particularly affected Quebec City and Montreal. (Canada, of course, also gives back to other countries needing help under the charter.)
During charter activations, Public Safety Canada is the lead department and the CSA is tasked with doing “observation acquisition” with satellites, with other government departments pitching in in their areas of expertise. Even in non-charter times, though, other satellites may be available to Canada if needed, although access is not as quick since the urgency is not present.
NRCan’s Johnston said geosynchronous satellites have an inherent advantage in that they can monitor a territory constantly and send information quickly, but Canada cannot take advantage of geosynchronous information so well due to our geographical position. “We’re so far from the equator, that their spatial resolutions are really bad, and they have to view through a deep column of atmosphere. They’re not great.”
Instead, Canada does its best to use international polar orbiters when it comes to fire prevention, Johnston said. The most common one is the long-standing MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument aboard the NASA Terra and Aqua satellites, which can look at aspects like soil moisture.
A newer instrument is VIIRS (Visible/Infrared Imager and Radiometer Suite) aboard the NASA-Japanese Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite and one of the Joint Polar Satellite System satellites (JPSS-1). “That’s the new state of the art, and that’s because we can mix the [infrared heat-seeking] band with other bands [available] on it,” Johnston said. “You get data like perimeter mapping of fires – and measurements of the energy released from fires – at 375-meter resolution, as opposed to the one kilometer that we used to get out of MODIS.”
Both Johnston and CSA’s Guy Aubé, project manager for Earth observation applications and utilizations, also pointed to European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 as a good source for monitoring Canada’s land surface in synthetic aperture radar (SAR), supplementing homegrown capabilities.
“All the satellites are acquiring image images on a daily basis around the globe,” Aubé said in an interview, and in non-urgent times, “all the images are put in archive so if – for example – a specific user wants to access an image product of a specific area, they can look in the archive.”
The workhorse for Canadian Earth observation information is the Radarsat family, which collects information in radar. The family includes Radarsat1 (retired), Radarsat2 and Radarsat Constellation Mission. (MDA, which manages these satellites, is also working on a next-generation synthetic aperture radar satellite called SARNext that is at an early stage of development.) Radar wavelengths are perfect to spot common signs of fire, like smoke.
Satellite information includes a complex set of data that also has forest fire risk elements like soil moisture, forest products, and vegetation products that sometimes are enhanced (perhaps through algorithms) through collaborations with other Canadian departments or industry, Aubé said.
One such collaboration related to fire is the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System, which is available for free on NRCan’s website and updated daily. It shows (on a very large scale) information such as hotspots, fire behaviour and fire danger. That said, Aubé said the key to success is getting ready for the problem far ahead of time, and this includes asking industry from time to time to provide their ideas to enhance Earth observation capabilities.
One example CSA pointed to was a 2016 Earth Observation Applications Development Program (EOADP) request for proposal “to develop innovative Earth Observation (EO) solutions that address disaster management application needs in a Canadian context, and demonstrate the added-value of the EO solution relative to existing practices and plan its operationalization,” according to tender documents.
The agency selected 10 projects to receive funding under an array of proposals that showed “their solution’s added value relative to existing practices and showcase steps leading to its implementation,” an additional CSA information page said. The full list of participating companies is available towards the bottom of the page.
On the fire side, in 2016 the CSA launched an RFP called “Development of Innovative Automation Solution for Disaster Management”, which had its roots in the devastating wildfires of Fort McMurray, Alberta in May 2016, Aubé said.
In response, Vancouver’s Hatfield Group received funding between 2016 and 2018 for creating Rapid Burned Area Mapping (R-BAM) technology, which “was required to complement conventional wildfire observation and assessment techniques in support of wildfire response and recovery efforts,” the group’s website says.
The project’s goal was to monitor forest fire progression along with “burn scars” left behind as flames rip through trees, vegetation and other natural products, Aubé said. “Also, the project was able to identify some the soil moisture content on the ground, and it was tested on the forest.”
Pointing to other collaborations, Aubé said other industry partners targeted aspects of forest fire management with satellites such as mitigation, response, recovery, mapping.
On the larger scale, CSA also is supporting dozens of projects in climate change and ecosystem resilience, which provides on-the-ground information about things such as soil moisture to enhance our understanding of satellite data, Aubé said. For example, the CSA held a Climate Change Impacts Ecosystem and Resilience workshop in December 2019 to discuss potential new partnerships and collaborations between government, industry and academia.
The need for collaboration and satellite systems is only set to accelerate as global warming takes a hold in Canada, however. WildFireSat’s webpage notes that the amount of Canadian forest burned by wildfire today is roughly 2.5 million hectares, equivalent to half of Nova Scotia’s area. By 2050, the equivalent of Nova Scotia’s territory may burn every year – so, double the amount seen now – due to factors like increased droughts and less air humidity.
“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,” the webpage noted.
Let’s hope our satellites can keep assisting with that effort in the coming decades.