A $2M grant from the NASA FireSense Technology Program (FIRET-23) will help CEE research assistant professor Mohamad Alipour and a team of collaborators develop canopy-penetrating radar systems capable of characterizing wildfire fuels that are difficult to capture with current technology. The project, led by PI and Siebel School of Computer Science assistant professor Elahe Soltanaghai, aims to improve pre-fire risk assessments and interventions in wildfire management.
Across fire-prone landscapes, risk assessments and interventions —such as long-term fire projections, fuel treatments, and prescribed burns— are crucial to mitigating the occurrence and spread of extreme fire events. These efforts rely heavily on remote sensing to characterize vegetation and fuels, but current technologies struggle to accurately recognize understory fuels obscured by the forest canopy.
To address these challenges, Alipour, Soltanaghai, and their team will develop an unmanned aerial system (UAS)-mounted radar system that uses radio frequency tags to enhance detection of understory fuels. Alipour’s role will bring his expertise in physics-informed data analytics to guide the development of the new sensing system. Alipour’s team in CEE develops sensing systems and algorithms that help digitize physical systems. Their work in this project will create physics-informed models to convert radar signals into maps of fuels that will ultimately enable lifesaving wildfire management decisions.
As a part of FIRET-23, the project will receive its funding over the course of three years. FIRET-23 is a technology development program housed under NASA's Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) developed in the pursuit of innovative ideas for earth system observation capabilities to monitor and predict extreme fire events. After the tragic wildfires that burned through Los Angeles and Southern California this January, their mission, as well as the work being done by the selected project teams, has become more paramount than ever.
Alongside Alipour, project collaborators taking on this challenge include UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Gabriel Rebeiz, U of I agricultural and bioengineering associate professor Girish Chowdhary, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory research scientist Karen An, and U.S. Forest Service Pacific Wildland Fire Science Lab research biologist Adam Watts.