Monitoring wildfires in Portugal with SKA-related technology

One of the major hazards in Portugal is wild forest fires. Fires have great economic impact and pose a serious life threat to communities.

The improvement of real-time fire monitoring and fire mapping has become a top national priority following the extreme incidents and loss of life of the last few years. To tackle fire prevention, a new project called Eye in the Sky is using a combination of information technologies developed for the SKA (such as cloud computing technologies and communication technologies for infrastructure management and device control) by the ENGAGE-SKA team at Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), with high altitude balloons (HAB) equipped with observation and communications payloads and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) responsible for the payload’s precise positioning above fire fronts.

It aims to improve the reliability of information for ground-based firefighting crews and provides real-time geotagged imagery to decision-making centres that coordinate the fighting resources.

According to Alexandra Moutinho, Principal investigator of the Eye in the Sky project, “our aim is to develop a platform for Earth observation that fills the gap between the large but time constrained coverage provided by satellites, and the on-demand local coverage provided by drones. The autonomy and long range of our solution makes it an interesting one for environmental monitoring missions like wildfire detection or oceanic observation.”

As IT Auxiliary Researcher Miguel Bergano adds: “Information technologies developed for fundamental research projects like the SKA also enable applications with wider socio-economic benefits. Here, technologies developed for the SKA’s Diagram of Eye in the Sky control systems combined with modern radio technologies enable reliable and real-time secure communication of critical forest fire data.”

Eye in the Sky is a collaboration between the Mechanical Engineering Institute at IST Lisbon, the Association for the Development of Industrial Aerodynamics (ADAI) at University of Coimbra and IT. It is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT, the Foundation for Science and Technology.

By Domingo Barbosa and Miguel Bergano (ENGAGE-SKA, Instituto de Telecomunições)

Diagram of Eye in the Sky

Credit: ENGAGE SKA