The Agriculture and Interior departments will invest $20 million to deploy advanced remote sensing technology in wildfire-prone areas with hopes of improving the speed and accuracy of finding fires, the departments said Tuesday.
The funds, made available through 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure law, will allow the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and other agencies to use data from NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series (GOES-R) to rapidly detect and report wildfire starts.
The spend is part of a $5 billion infrastructure investment by the Biden administration to shore up wildfire preparedness, fuels management, post-fire restoration and fire science. Experts say climate warming is contributing to weather conditions that are conducive to wildfire. Those include extreme drought, heat and powerful windstorms that can push fires across thousands of square miles.
“This partnership is one of the many ways we are investing in technology to improve firefighter and community safety,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a release. “Wildland firefighting will always require highly skilled individuals working on the ground, but with more real-time information we can reduce the risks to crews and pilots, and improve our response time to the public.”
