Atmospheric Composition & Chemical Processes: Instruments

NightFOX is a lightweight remote sensing payload designed to be mounted on a small fixed-wing unmanned aircraft system (UAS) for wildfire observations. Outfitted with infrared sensors and an onboard data system, NightFOX measures the extent and intensity of a fire from a safe altitude for a fraction of the expense of more sophisticated instruments flown on specialized aircraft. NightFOX was developed at the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL) by Dr. Ru-Shan Gao, Dr. Troy Thornberry, Steve Ciciora, and other members of their team. Mission support is provided by a diverse team including CSL members and the UAS platform provider, Black Swift Technologies.

An instrument designed for a UAS observation platform is uniquely suited for remotely measuring wildfire. In-situ measurement is challenging due to intense heat in a large fire and lacks spatial extent. Remote observation with infrared satellite instrumentation is useful, but resolution is coarse compared to the size of intensely burning regions. Aircraft can carry large payloads of sophisticated observing instrumentation but are expensive, difficult to coordinate with incident command, and are not flown over fires at night. NightFOX (the Nighttime Fire Observations eXperiment) provides a low-cost and low-overhead option for high-resolution wildfire remote sensing that can fill observation gaps, particularly at night when fires burn at lower intensity.

Instruments on the NightFOX payload include custom-built narrow-band 4 micron scanning telescopes, a custom-built wide-angle 1.6 micron imager, a laser rangefinder, and a dual visible/IR (infrared) imager. At the design altitude of 1 km, NightFOX measures fire extent and intensity at sub-20 meter resolution.