Midway through what experts called an average fire season, NASA has announced a plan to begin monitoring wildfires using satellites in space, Live Science reported.
Doug Morton, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is a NASA scientist who tracks and predicts wildfires. He said, although California and Alaska saw wildfires earlier than normal, in May, the "burn season" has been on par with past averages.
"If you go back over the last 30 or 40 years in the U.S., you see this strong increasing trend in the total amount of [acres] burning each year," said Morton. "The early fires around Los Angeles in May were pretty unique, but 2013 is an average burn year."
One of Morton's prediction and prevention efforts is to predict annual Brazilian and Amazonian fires and track their smoke and other particles as they travel airborne through atmospheric currents.
Morton also said dry seasons are a growing concern, as droughts like the one of the Great Plains in 2012 are likely to become much more frequent.
"The scale of the drought we saw in 2012 across the [Great] Plains and the far range of the Rockies was pretty extreme drought, one you might see only once in a decade," Morton said. "By the middle of the century, we're predicting to see years like that four or five times a decade. By the end of the century, it will be like that every year in the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies. It will be the new normal."
Last year, at this time, wildfires had burned 4.9 million acres compared to 2.5 million acres this year. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, 28 firefighters have died battling wildfires this year.
NASA has two satellites that track wildfires and can report them to firemen within 30 minutes of snapping a photo from the geostationary weather satellite. The fire must already be fairly large for this to be possible.
Total amounts of acres burned have increased year by year and NASA experts could only speculate as to why. Fire suppression was one possible explanation, as well as moving from a wetter, cooler climate in the west to a hotter, drier one.
Experts agreed that a growing population may not be the cause, but it certainly helps maximize damage done to lives and property.
"If you put people into the wild lands and the grasslands, that guarantees fire," Bill Patzert, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said during the hangout. "As more people move into harm's way, it becomes a serious problem."
