Aerial thermal imagery has much application in the field of wildland firefighting. Through the use of programming languages such as R and Python, as well as open-source GIS software, we have been able to greatly improve one company’s pipeline for these products on all fronts. We have been able to decrease processing times by a factor of five, improve ground accuracy by a factor of ten, add meaningful units to the resulting thermal map, and reduce processing costs of the company. In this presentation, we will discuss our methods for achieving these results as well as give an overview of how aerial thermal imagery is used in the wildland firefighting industry.
