every year thousands of acres of
Southern California fires are wiped out
by wildfire that's why be so surprised
to see crews from Los Angeles County
Fire Department actually sending the
blades in the San Gabriel Mountains
about 17 using a ground-based device on
the territory and a pellet or jumping
jellied gasoline of love
the goal was to prevent a larger
potentially catastrophic wildfire in
this area of heavy dead vegetation but
the controlled burn also served another
purpose it gave numerous scientific
groups including two from NASA an
opportunity to study the impact of
natural fires on our environment
a primary concern is the effect of
large-scale burning on our atmosphere
according to a scientist from NASA's
Langley Research Center in Hampton
Virginia Joel Levine we have evidence
that certain gases are building up we
have evidence that climate may in fact
be changing it turns out that burning
biomass forests vegetation grass shrubs
is a very important source of a number
of these gases that have very important
environmental impacts one significant
gas produced by burning vegetation is
carbon dioxide computer models suggest
that if the level of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere is doubled the average
temperature of the earth will go up
three to four degrees result could be
extensive melting at the North and South
Poles causing widespread flooding in
coastal areas around the world
agricultural growing patterns could also
be dramatically change
crops now harvested in the central us
for example might only grow in Canada to
determine how much carbon dioxide and
other so-called greenhouse gases were
coming off the Lodi Canyon burn Langley
researcher Randy Cofer working aboard a
fire department helicopter flew through
the smoke globe collecting samples these
are currently being analyzed at the mess
ascent plugin might be some soil is
paper
natural fire from a different angle
65,000 feet above is another group 0
muscle circular sister Ames Research
Center in Mountain wheeler telephonic to
my own
your eyes
looks like we do have some of the
thermal activity coming through a
smartphone from imagery generated by the
airborne scanner during the load I
inspire idea NASA research scientist Jim
brass scholars and writers portions and
determine a significantly higher istics
of the blade solberg is tempted or
signal we have seen the smoke see what
we have what we're trying to do is
develop a tool to predict what Langley
collects essentially they know for a
fact the types of gases and where they
were collected so what we do is we use
Langley's data as what we call the
ground truth the basic information we
overlay are remotely sends data on the
top of that and hopefully looking those
together we can put a model together
that may predict not only on a local
basis but a regional and global basis
what fire is actually doing from the
standpoint of atmospherics studying
forest fires and effort by NASA to
assess the impact of large-scale of work
on our environment
you