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NOVA News Minutes Fire Hunter (running time 01:17) Transcript May 2, 2003 NARRATOR: Fire season is back. This is one of 15,000 fires that have already burned more than 300,000 acres in the U.S. As seen on PBS's NOVA, fire managers need all the help they can get when making life-or-death decisions. JOE CARVELHO (Incident Commander): Can you give me a little rundown on what's going on out there on the fire? NARRATOR: So Don McKeown and Michael Richardson got funding from NASA to create a state-of-the-art system equipped with infrared cameras to detect and monitor forest fires from the air. DON MCKEOWN (Rochester Institute of Technology): We will be able to make an estimate of the size and intensity of the fire that we detect. So that will be a factor in the decision-making process for the fire manager. NARRATOR: Next they'll add a Global Positioning System and mapping software in order to feed crucial information to the firefighters below. DON MCKEOWN (Rochester Institute of Technology): We'll be able to provide an information product to the fire manager that says not only this is the latitude and longitude of the fire, but this is where the fire is relative to terrain features, to a road that you may want to use to get at the fire, or if there's any areas of concern that may be near the fire that you want to protect. NARRATOR: McKeown's system will be able to detect fires on the ground as small as eight inches, and he expects it to be ready for use by the 2004 fire season. I'm Brad Kloza.
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