Prescribed grass fire evolution mapping and rate of spread measurement using orthorectified thermal imagery from a fixed-wing UAS

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fire metrics such as fire front location and rate of spread (ROS) are critical to understanding the behavior of prescribed fires and wildfires. This paper proposes a new method for prescribed grass fire evolution mapping and ROS measurement using multitemporal thermal orthomosaics collected by a small fixed-wing Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) at low altitudes. The proposed method provides a low-cost, safe, and effective solution for active grass fire monitoring and fire metric measurement in areas that may be challenging for a typical rotor-wing UAS to cover due to endurance and size constraints. The proposed method is demonstrated using a prescribed grass fire data set collected by the KHawk fixed-wing UAS over a 13 ha. Kansas tallgrass prairie field on 8 October 2019. Repeat-pass thermal images collected by the KHawk UAS during about 10 min of the burning were grouped and processed to produce multitemporal orthomosaics with a spatial resolution of about m and a horizontal position error of about 1.5 m. The resulting orthomosaics were further processed for fire front extraction and the measurement of fire front location and ROS. The head fire ROS of this grass burn was observed to be between 0.2 and 0.4 with a mean value of 0.27 .