Development of wildfire detection and trajectory tracking system using scanning LiDAR

Recently, several huge wildfires in South Korea caused record-breaking damage and casualties. In addition, wildfire occurrence and the amount of damages showed an increasing trend from the 1970s to the 2020s. Moreover, wildfires have become a major concern for the public and key ministries. Thus, the Korean government has been operating various wildfire observation systems using watch towers, CCTV, sensors, observers, etc. However, these systems have spatiotemporal and technical limitations such as short effective distances and discontinuous monitoring. Despite remarkable advances in wildfire detection, it remains challenging to early detect rapidly long-range wildfire events. Here, we developed equipment for early wildfire detection based on scanning Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) as a proof of concept to fill that void. Existing scanning LiDAR is used to track and monitor aerosol plumes providing multi-dimensional views of atmospheric layers. An early wildfire detection system using scanning LiDAR has improved for detection of wildfire smoke within 15 minutes with an enhanced spatial distance over a 10km radius and contained both eye safety function and trajectory tracking for point of ignition using HYSPLIT-based Emissions Inverse Modeling System for wildfires (HEIMS-fire).  We showed that the enhanced system continuously detected fire and smoke in rural areas during the day and night. The developed scanning LiDAR system can likely be used for early wildfire detection to prevent large-scale disasters.

Acknowledgement: This research was supported by a grant (2023-MOIS-20024324) of Ministry-Cooperation R&D Program of Disaster-Safety funded by Ministry of Interior and Safety (MOIS, Korea).