Distributed Spacecraft with Heuristic Intelligence to Monitor Wildfire Spread for Responsive Control
Sreeja Nag, Vinay Ravindra, Richard Levinson, Mahta Moghaddam, Kurtis J. Nelson, Jan Mandel, Adam Krzysztof Kochanski, Angel Farguell, Amer Melebari, Archana Kannan, Ryan Ketzner · 2024
We develop and verify a space-based, distributed, adaptive intelligent, responsive New Observing System (NOS) to improve wildfire response decisions by monitoring and forecasting fuel flammability and wildfire spread and providing on-demand fire danger and burnt area maps. We use Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) as the NOS, informed by improvements to existing frameworks - D-SHIELD (Distributed Spacecraft with Heuristic Intelligence to Enable Logistical Decisions) and WRFx (Weather Research and Forecasting Fire Spread Model). Five new products are developed/enhanced using GNSS-R data from CYGNSS (7-sat NASA mission) and Spire Global (commercial fleet) and assimilated into WRFx, which improves existing USGS fire danger and LANDFIRE fuel layers products. These products are expected to inform observation planning and fire management via an observation value framework and a fire forecast reporter that we develop. Adaptive intelligence to dynamically task the observing (satellites) and planning (ground stations) assets, and synchronization between them, is achieved using novel Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based planner.