Airborne Remote Sensors have long been a cornerstone of wild-land fire research and recently 3-D fire behavior models fully coupled to the atmosphere are beginning to show real skill. The WiFE project (Wild Fire Experiment) attempts the marriage of airborne remote sensors, multi-sensor observations and fire model verification and development. An interagency array of sensors are mounted on the research C-130 of the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for this project. Many of our observational goals were reached in the 1998 fire season in this preliminary proof of concept program. In 1998, we worked to observe the biggest fires that we could find within about 1500km of our base in Colorado (～3 hours flying time). We sought the most extreme and complex fire behavior that nature had to offer us and then found some dramatic examples. The principle WiFE observing tools were: ● A cooled 305 um IR high speed imager (30Hz). ● A NASA/Forest Service built cooled multi-channel IR cross track line scanning imager ● A 37 and 90 GHz passive microwave cross-track line scanner/imager with both polarization in each wavelength channel.
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