The Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership (WRAP) project was successfully competed and funded in 2003 under the NASA Office of Earth Science (OES) Cooperative Agreement Notice (CAN) CAN-02-OES-01, entitled "Earth Science REASoN – Research, Education, and Applications Solutions Network, A Distributed Network of Data and Information Providers For Earth Science Enterprise Science, Applications and Education. The project proposal, originally entitled "NASA Wildfire Response R&D, Applications and Technology Implementation" (REASoN-0109-0172), was shortened to WRAP to highlight the collaborative partnership of the US Forest Service and NASA in wildfire science and applications. The project was originally a 5-year funded effort, initiated in July 2003. The project has been extended an extra year, through the 2008 fire season.

The objectives of the project are to foster collaborative partnerships between NASA and the US Forest Service to facilitate and demonstrate evolved and evolving technologies for increasing the information content and timeliness of earth resource data collected for wildfires. Both agencies have worked collaboratively on parallel-track developments in fire imaging, but this initiative is the first major effort at formalizing and focusing wildfire science and applications between the agencies. The outcomes of this collaborative effort are creation of improved tools for Wildfire Decision Support Systems within the US Forest Service and the other fire mitigation and management agencies.

2008 Western States UAS Fire Imaging Mission Status

The 2008 Western States Fire Mission got off to an early start in response to fire emergencies in California. Late June lightning storms sparked thousands of wildfires in bone-dry California, prompting an emergency request from CalFire for fire perimeter data from NASA's Ikhana with the Autonomous Modular Sensor (AMS) – Wildfire instrument, a UAS fire-imaging system which was successfully utilized in the 2007 fire season and during the October 2007 southern California firestorms. In response, the Ikhana / AMS system flew July 8 and July 19, 2008, providing data over major California fires. (See images under "products" link). An emergency COA was issued by the FAA for these missions for operations in California extending until August 1st, when the original COA was to initialize.

Originally scheduled to begin on 1 August, the 2008 Western States Fire Mission will demonstrate and extend the use of all components of the Ikhana/AMS system for fire response in the 2008 fire season. Still planned are a series of four (4) missions imaging over wildfires spread throughout the western US. The missions are planned for approximately one flight a week and missions extending for 20-24 hours duration. Missions should be completed by mid-September, 2008. There are three flight regions that the missions will variously cover: the west coast region, encompassing California, Oregon and Washington; the Great Basin / No. Rockies, which include Nevada, Utah, Idaho, western Montana and Wyoming: and the Rocky Mountains and Southwest, which includes Nevada, New Mexico, western Colorado and eastern Utah.

Real-time fire imagery, collected from an autonomous sensor on the UAS will be terrain- and geo-rectified automatically (on-board) and transmitted to the web for use in various visualization tools, including GoogleEarth. Additional information of importance on wildfire imaging will also be ported through the same servers and viewable as GoogleEarth files simultaneously. This additional information includes RAWS weather station data, GOESS weather data, satellite coverage maps for MODIS, lightning detection data and aircraft state data. The real-time aircraft state data can be used to reference the location of the aircraft during the missions. Further, real-time small-format video data, collected from a camera on the Ikhana UAS is available as well. All imagery, both archived and current is readily viewable in our Collaborative Decision Environment (CDE) utilizing GoogleEarth.

Further information and the link to the Collaborative Decision Environment can be found at the "Current Activities and Demonstrations / Current Missions" (seen on the left bar).