Heathland burning for fire research
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This spring saw a widely publicised UK ‘wildfire crisis’ affecting many parts of the country. Wildfires in moorlands, heathlands, woodlands and forests led to large-scale landscape impacts, road and school closures, and significant strain on the emergency services. Though UK wildfires are significant in terms of their use of fire fighting resources and their suppression costs, very little is known about important variables that could be used to forecast fire risk and fire danger in the UK.
As part of a series of ongoing fieldwork campaigns at “prescribed” burning in England, a team led by Professor Martin Wooster from the geography department’s Environmental Monitoring & Modelling Group, recently took part in a week-long exercise in Dorset, where a number of prescribed fires were lit for research purposes.
The team’s research involves using a variety of remote sensing techniques and meteorological measurements. Thermal cameras are used to record each fire, yielding important information about the fire intensity and rate-of-spread. By combining thermal imagery with biomass sampling of the experimental plot before and after each fire, we can establish a relationship between the energy released by the fire and the amount of fuel consumed. This relationship can then be used to estimate burnt biomass from satellite-based thermal imagers.
Other research conducted by the team from King's included the first measurements of the gases in the smoke emitted from UK vegetation fuel types, useful for refining national emissions inventories. The research burns were covered in the media by BBC, ITV Meridian, CBBC Newsround and the print press.
As part of a series of ongoing fieldwork campaigns at “prescribed” burning in England, a team led by Professor Martin Wooster from the geography department’s Environmental Monitoring & Modelling Group, recently took part in a week-long exercise in Dorset, where a number of prescribed fires were lit for research purposes.
The team’s research involves using a variety of remote sensing techniques and meteorological measurements. Thermal cameras are used to record each fire, yielding important information about the fire intensity and rate-of-spread. By combining thermal imagery with biomass sampling of the experimental plot before and after each fire, we can establish a relationship between the energy released by the fire and the amount of fuel consumed. This relationship can then be used to estimate burnt biomass from satellite-based thermal imagers.
Other research conducted by the team from King's included the first measurements of the gases in the smoke emitted from UK vegetation fuel types, useful for refining national emissions inventories. The research burns were covered in the media by BBC, ITV Meridian, CBBC Newsround and the print press.
