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Augmenting Wildfire Response with Stratospheric Microballoons

Writer's picture: Urban SkyUrban Sky

Updated: Jan 28

Wildfires continue to wreak havoc on communities worldwide. The recent and ongoing fires in California are a tragic example of the devastating impact of forest fires. At Urban Sky, we’re working hard to help, by developing new technology to support wildfire detection and real-time, high-resolution fire mapping. 

 

Urban Sky has spent the last five years developing the stratospheric Microballoon™ (pictured below), which is a rapidly deployable, low-cost, navigable and persistent stratospheric balloon that’s paired with sensors for real-time, broad-area, high-resolution Earth Observation. Our Microballoons operate in the space between airplanes and satellites, well above commercial aircraft. At these altitudes (roughly 60,000 ft.,) Microballoons maintain a unique vantage point where vast areas can be imaged while avoiding restricted airspace and without disrupting firefighting aircraft beneath them. This stands in stark contrast to lower-altitude, fire-mapping aircraft and drones which pose logistical and safety challenges by operating directly within restricted, often smoke-occluded airspace. While satellites overcome this airspace issue by operating in orbit, satellite data lacks spatial resolution, revisit rate (i.e., temporal resolution), and the ability to persist and remain stationary above fire zones for long periods of time. In short, this can result in a lack of recent, high-resolution wildfire data to support real-time detection and firefighting efforts.  


The Stratospheric Microballoon
The Stratospheric Microballoon

The stratosphere will play a vital role in the future of real-time wildfire mapping. Urban Sky is developing and actively testing the “Hot Spot” system to help address this problem. Hot Spot, funded in part by NASA and the U.S. Air Force, is a lightweight, real-time Long-Wave-Infrared (LWIR) imaging system designed for the stratospheric Microballoon. The Hot Spot payload weighs less than 6lbs and can be deployed in less than ten minutes by one operator to capture real-time, broad-area wildfire data without impacting active airborne firefighting efforts.  


Urban Sky recently deployed this sensor directly above the Palisades Fire in California to capture high-resolution infrared data, resulting in a heat map that is more than 100x higher resolution than publicly available satellite data like MODIS and VIIRS.  


This Palisades Fire Earth Observation mission took place on Sunday, January 19th, 2025, and represented a critical step forward in improving this technology. The mission resulted in the collection of over 500 square kilometers (or >100,000 acres) of 3-meter resolution LWIR data in the fire zone. The resulting map below is a normalized (non-radiometric) infrared image showing where data was collected. An “L1B” frame-level product can accompany this overview map to provide not only thermal radiance (and ultimately ground temperature values,) but also temporal depth, allowing a user to see the fire changing over time instead of receiving just a moment-in-time image of the fire area.    


~3m resolution Long-Wave-Infrared (LWIR) data captured above the Palisades Fire from a Microballoon on Jan 19, 2025
~3m resolution Long-Wave-Infrared (LWIR) data captured above the Palisades Fire from a Microballoon on Jan 19, 2025

Stratospheric Microballoons are equipped with novel altitude control capabilities, which allow for active navigation and station-keeping, unlocking persistent, high-resolution imaging above fire-affected areas. The image below shows the flight path of the Microballoon for this imaging mission above the Palisades Fire. The shaded purple area depicts the actual collection area of the Hot Spot sensor, representing ~ 3,000 square km of total data collected. The shaded red area on the map below depicts the “temporary flight restriction” (TFR) zone, which is an area controlled by airspace officials to deconflict airborne firefighting efforts. Microballoons can be deployed well outside of these TFR regions (which typically extend to 12,000 feet above ground level), then navigated above the fire-affected areas at altitudes >60,000 ft. At these altitudes, Microballoons pose no risk to lower-altitude airborne firefighting efforts.  


The flight and imaging path of the Hot Spot Microballoon on Jan 19, 2025.
The flight and imaging path of the Hot Spot Microballoon on Jan 19, 2025.

As high-resolution images are captured by the Hot Spot payload, they’re geolocated through an onboard, edge-processing algorithm, and information from these images is transmitted to the ground within a few minutes of image capture, providing high-frequency updates of the the location of hot spots as a fire evolves.  


From the vantage point of the stratosphere, Hot Spot can capture high-resolution infrared imagery that allows firefighters to distinguish between individual trees and determine the fire line in high-resolution, and the system can hover over a fire for several hours, providing valuable updates on the current state of fires.  


The image below depicts several Hot Spot frames of the same area near Malibu; each frame is separated by 1-2 minutes, demonstrating the ability of Hot Spot to deliver high-frequency updates of active fires. The red perimeters identify the system’s ability to threshold the highest value infrared pixels, which, when developed and calibrated further, will correlate to active fire and smoldering zones. 



While the Hot Spot system is under active development, data captured and processed from the Palisades fire can be viewed and downloaded via the links below. We encourage everyone to download and explore the data and provide product feedback to the Urban Sky team for future developmental efforts.  


Long-wave-infrared (LWIR) data:


TIFF file: 


JSON STAC Metadata file:


L1B Uncalibrated Radiometric Dataset: (contact us for more information on how to use this dataset):


In addition the Hot Spot system, Urban Sky also deployed its more mature, high-resolution (~10cm) aerial imaging payload above the region for this mission. That data is fully processed and freely available at the links below, with coverage matching the screenshot shown.

~10cm RGB data covering the Palisades Fire region on Jan 19, 2025.
~10cm RGB data covering the Palisades Fire region on Jan 19, 2025.

High-res Aerial Imagery (RGB) data:


TIFF file: 


JSON STAC Metadata file:


Overview Image:


While there’s much more work to do, this mission represents an important step towards a future where stratospheric vehicles will actively support real-time wildfire mapping and early detection. Please feel free to reach out to Urban Sky via email at info@urbansky.com with any questions about the data or ideas for collaboration. 

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