Satellite and aircraft images play key role in battle against massive Arizona fire

Federal fire managers are using infrared imagery from NASA satellites and from daily aircraft flights over eastern Arizona in their fight against the 12-day-old Wallow Fire.

The fire that has charred more than 300,000 acres -- including more than 82,000 acres in one day -- is 0 percent contained, according to Ken Frederick, a spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Tall, dry timber continues to fuel it.

Managers have dispatched 1,100 additional personnel within the past 24 hours, boosting the number of firefighters by roughly a third to 3,012, Frederick said. The responders from around the country are using a number of high-tech tools to help plan their tactics, which include backfires, bulldozers to clear fire lines, 16 helicopters to drop fire retardant and 197 fire engines.

On the national level, Frederick said NIFC uses data from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers (MODIS) from two NASA satellites to eyeball fires around the country and help plan the allocation of firefighting resources.

Holli Riebeek, an education and public outreach specialist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said the MODIS instruments use infrared imaging to see the thermal hot spots in fires. This information is then downloaded by the Forest Service Remote Applications Center in Salt Lake City, which prepares tailored products for incident management teams.

The Wallow Fire has generated massive smoke plumes that last week started drifting into New Mexico, where local authorities issued health alerts.

Rob Gutrow, a Goddard spokesman, said NASA is using its CALIPSO satellite to track the smoke plumes, and then overlaying the plume information onto MODIS data.

To finetune the Wallow Fire's hot spot information, Frederick said, the Forest Service Infrared Mapping Section operates daily flights equipped with an instrument called a Kennedy Line Scanner, which can pinpoint hot spots within a quarter-mile radius.

That information is downloaded in real time to an infrared imagery interpreter at the Wallow Fire incident management team headquarters in Springerville, Ariz., Frederick said. A specialist there then plots the hot spots on a map, which provides the fire situation team leader with intelligence to help battle the fire, Frederick said.

Susan Zornek, a Forest Service spokeswoman in Springerville, said this imagery helps managers determine where, for example, to build bulldoze lines to contain the fire.

As the fire continues to spread unabated, Zornek said local authorities have ordered evacuations of local communities, including Springerville and nearby Eager, Ariz. The Forest Service has also set up an incident management team in Luna, N.M., 48 miles southeast of Springerville, to battle the fire if it leaps across the state borders.