While firefighters from as far away as Alaska are being called in to help fight the fires now consuming the United States' southwest, some of the most crucial assistance remains 23,000 miles away, in orbit.

Satellite photos and data are important in assisting teams on the ground predict, spot, and observe fire outbreaks. That role, however, is now even bigger thanks to a new software program that turns around fire assessments more quickly and accurately.

This program takes the feeds from the GOES 8 and GOES 10 satellites to generate fire data for the entire Western Hemisphere every 30 minutes. Ground station computers take that data, and 96 snapshots per day, to send out in map form to emergency personnel within 60 minutes of transmitted.

The GOES images have a resolution of 2.4 miles (4 kilometers) and NOAA supplements this information with 550-yard (one kilometer) resolution shots taken from polar orbiting satellites just 510 miles (850 km) above Earth. These satellites swing longitudinally to take 141 photos a day, but over any one spot just twice. NOAA just launched such a satellite Monday.

"Satellites work best for spotting fires starting in remote areas not served by roads and there's not a lot of access," McNamara said. "Firefighters down on the ground know the fire they are fighting but they might not know of a new fire that isn’t in local area." In recent weeks, we have seen disparate fires in Arizona spread so quickly that they eventually merge into a unified front.

Space-based data also provides managerial support to firefighters. "Our main customers are the people divvying up resources between fighting multiple fires. All the local leaders are saying 'we need more people,' so satellites give a strategic view of the situation, where to best spend our resources," McNamara continued.

Some satellites observe the globe as a person would view a scene. Imagine a red fire truck rushing onto the scene of a fire, rotating lights and strobes flaring, the wall of flame ahead of it, sunshine glaring off the chrome, smoke rising into the cloudbanks above. Human eyes would take it all in at once – photons would strike your retina, stimulating nerve messages that the brain would process as red paint, illumination of many kinds, smoke, and clouds.

For the satellite, a grading of multiple filters and detectors ensure that light pouring in all at once is identified and catalogued in a quick and orderly fashion, to produce useful data.

However, some satellites are endlessly channel-surfing through the planet's radiation spectrum. Moving rapidly through frequencies that match what humans perceive as color, the satellites exceed our visual range; one moment seeing only the light humans associate with sun-reflecting water, the next, that light which is identified with certain clouds.

For example, radiation at 12.6 microns measures water in the atmosphere, while at 9.7 microns a satellite will see ozone and at a frequency as high as 1.6 microns, it will identify smoke and aerosol.

The WFABBA software was developed by the University of Wisconsin to run on portable Linux personal computers. It crunches data from the three of the five wavelengths that the GOES units process simultaneously: 4 micron infrared (which allows for hotspot detection), 11 micron infrared (for estimated background temperature), and the visible (cloud-reflected sunlight in day viewings).

When combined with related weather and topographical information, the program's sophisticated statistical method identifies fires automatically, and supporting numerical techniques then sizes-up the conflagration in terms of area and intensity, explains developer Chris Schmidt. Schmidt is part of NOAA scientist Elaine Prins' biomass burning research team.

Such information is not only valuable for saving lives and property on a local level, but also to understand fire's role in planetary climatology. Japan and Europe plan to add their geostationary satellite capabilities to the effort within the next two years, creating a nearly global fire detection system.

Regarding the current limitations to the NOAA fire satellite system, McNamara concedes that the "biggest problem is false detects. These satellites were made for cloud detection and temperature. Future polar satellites will have an always-on 3.7 micron channel for fire detection and instead of having five or six channels, they'll have 30 or 40 channels."

With satellites equipped with a limited channel range, asphalt that's been baking day in and day out in an intense summer heat wave can read as fire to a computer. It would be like having a thermometer that stops at 330 degrees Kelvin (134 degrees Fahrenheit or 57 degrees Celsius).

Though much cooler than a fire, if the measurements max out at that point, observers would have to check out conditions in the area in order to verify the findings. The last thing disaster control administrators out west need right now is to shunt resources off to a parking lot or clay flatland areas that a machine mistook for fire.

The software program is superior to earlier computer systems, according to Schmidt.

"Our algorithm is also different from those used for other platforms in that it allows, under certain conditions, instantaneous estimates of fire temperature and size. These are only estimates and not the gospel truth, but they have proven to be useful in estimating the smoke output of a fire. Most other algorithms only tell you "yes/no" on whether something is a fire, whereas the WFABBA gives confidence levels and characteristics for each fire," Schmidt explains.

NOAA relies on human intelligence too. "One advantage in our shop is trained satellite analysts. They look at images and integrate sources. We're still at a point where to be confident in what we're putting out we still need a person to look at all the data," McNamara said. "We like to believe that with the human in the loop, we're making the best of the GOES world, polar orbit world, and personal quality checking." NOAA also has specialists on site, a meteorological "A Team" dispatched to fires.

In space, however, it may be some time before firefighting gets dedicated resources. It's just too costly to have such specialized hardware.

"The real budget limiting factor is creating operational environmental satellites that meet the needs of the weather monitoring, climate change, and fire monitoring communities," Schmidt said. "Sometimes these needs conflict with each other. Outfitting an operational environmental satellite with all the devices that everyone wants would be extremely expensive, so compromises need to be made and the costs and benefits of each item on the wish-list need to be weighed."

Though ultimately, Schmidt said, "we could always make use of more frequent data, higher resolutions, and more bands of infrared data to further refine our fire detection data."