FALSE alarms of forest fires, triggered by satellite images, could become a thing of the past thanks to a new way to tell if plants are burning.
Fires are currently spotted by detecting heat, but things like volcanic activity can be mistaken for fire. The new technique, developed by Tony Vodacek of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York State and Don Latham of the US Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, takes advantage of the fact that potassium, an element found in vegetation, absorbs radiation at a specific frequency when it burns (International Journal of Remote Sensing, vol…
