Near-Real Time Active Fire Detection from Space with the Forest-Constellation

Remote sensing data is a key tool in disaster response and preparedness. For fire detection and monitoring, however, public satellite missions have significant coverage gaps in the afternoon. As most fires start in the afternoon, however, many can burn potentially undetected for a long period of time. 

This is why OroraTech is building the Forest Constellation to close this afternoon gap. With two successful launches completed and an additional 9 satellites scheduled to be in orbit by the time of EGU 25, the constellation will achieve a 12-hour revisit time for any location on Earth focusing on late afternoon orbits. FOREST-2, the current sensor generation in orbit covers a swath of 410km in a single scan at a resolution of 200m per pixel. Future launches will further enhance the system, eventually enabling a global revisit time of just 30 minutes. This increased temporal and spatial coverage will allow for significantly earlier fire detection. 

The fire detection is run on board on a GPU to keep latencies minimal. This is because downlink bottlenecks are easier to circumvent with bites of fire location files then GB size satellite images. Otherwise, the file transfer of a satellite image to the ground would introduce a significant bottleneck. To cut down communication latencies further, we rely on a dedicated ground station network with OroraTech’s Fire Link technology. With the upcoming satellite launches, we therefore enable fire detection within minutes after the satellite overpass. At EGU, we aim to showcase current and future capabilities of our constellation to detect fires with first impressions from upcoming launches.