New forest fire detection system prototype installed at Lake Tahoe

...The network of live cameras will enable citizen firewatchers to quickly raise an alarm if a fire is seen, providing a quick response and thereby reducing potentially huge carbon emissions from a forest fire as well as saving lives and property. Firefighters will also be able to monitor the fire to better deploy resources and warn residents who may be in the path of a fire...

Maybe over that last hundred years or so we should have learned that the occasional carbon emissions from a forest fire are a good thing in that they prevent a larger catastrophe later.

In addition to an array of fixed cameras, how about sending up a few Predator or like drones to crisscross a surveillance area and send back images? Infrared might be a good detection frequency.

There was once a lookout tower at the top of Mt. Adams (Pah-to, some 12,000 feet) in Washington State. Now there's a surveillance area!

If you look at my website www.specialcamera.com you will see that UV is a much, much better detector of flame then infrared.

When you first look at the MultiCAM images, it may not be obvious, there is one set that is of a flare stack the red ball is UV from the flame several miles away, another showing a grass fire beside the highway, where the UV overlaid onto visible and with the push of one button the UV is overlaid onto infrared.

With the UV we can see flames burning "new" (i.e. direction of travel) fire, helping to determine surface wind directions also.

With the infrared (and visible) it shows the extent of the burned area.

I am the North American distributor of the MultiCAM, please contact me cameras@maqs.net with all applications.

Interesting information. I was guessing a bit on infrared, which might pick up wider area but lower intensity heat sources. This is similar, I suspect, to the trade-offs in IR vs UV flame sensing in boilers; not necessarily one absolute best answer.