Data

		On Saturday, October 28, the NASA Fire Mission flew one more flight with the NASA AMS-Wildfire sensor (but, without NOAA UCATS, NASA REVEAL, or NASA ARGUS) over the Esperanza, California fire (see map to left - white circle area is the restricted airspace for that fire and photo below). The UCATS team at Gray Butte was headed home Friday when the flight was planned. Four firefighters lost their lives as the probable result of this wildfire started by arson (see attached LA times article). The last minute flight was requested by Incident Command Team, the State of California Office of Emergency Services, and the Governor's Office. The FAA approved a Certificate of Authority (COA) in less 9 hours. The AMS sensor fed real-time IR imagery of hot spots in that fire to those California offices. Altair flew for 16.6 hours (limited by available pilots) with takeoff at 3:47 pm (local time) Saturday with a landing at 7:14 am on Sunday. The fire covered 40,200 acres, a category 1 (top priority), and 85% contained today. All resources were brought to bear including a rarely used jumbo air tanker that dropped 12,000 gallons of fire retardant in continuous 1/2 mile line (a DC-10).
		To the left are the boxes that the FAA granted a Certificate of Authority (COA). Altair could have flown over in any one of them after giving the FAA 48 hours notice. This covers almost all national parks and forests.
Flight track from 21 hour duration flight on 11-12 October 2006.		Water vapor and ozone mixing ratios, and other UCATS data are sent in real time from the Altair UAS via the REVEAL instrument through Iridium satellite phone modems that are connected to the Internet on the ground. The data are plotted in real time from software running at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center and Creare Inc. Using the map program, Google Earth (available free), a curtain plot using altitude, latitude, and longitude has relative amounts of ozone (yellow) and water vapor (red) plotted as a function of time along the flight plan. Also plotted from top to bottom are graphs of GPS Altitude in meters, UCATS Short Path H2O (good for the troposphere) in parts-per-million (ppm) of water vapor, UCATS Long Path H2O (good for upper troposphere and stratosphere) in ppm, UCATS ozone mixing ratios in parts-per-billion (ppb), and UCATS ambient temperature in Celsius over the last 10 minutes of the flight. Links for more information: Creare Inc. (http://www.creare.com) Google Earth (http://earth.google.com) NASA REVEAL (www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/research/ESCD/OTH/Tools_Technologies/reveal.html) Watch a short movie of the takeoff  – part two
Test of a flight plan to observe fires over the Yosemite National Park in California. Actual flight path is in blue and the flight plan with numbered way points is in red using Google Earth software.

 

Relative humidity Vaisala probe readings compared to water vapor mixing ratios in parts-per-million by volume (ppmv) from the Tunable Diode Laser (TDL) both are part of the UCATS instrument.  Data were taken on the first test flight of Altair for the NASA Fire Mission on 15 August 2006.  Note that both instruments are seeing similar water signatures.  The x-axis is the GMT time of the flight which was about 2 hours of duration.   (Plot courtesy of Dale Hurst).

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Flight Tracks from 16 August 2006:

(Click on each image to view a larger version)

 

 

 

 

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