Fire Forward Rate of Growth Sensors (FROGS)
What are they?
​
Forward Rate of Growth (FROG) sensors (patent pending) are devices that provide real-time data on conditions at the head of an active wildfire front where it is normally too dangerous for firefighters to work.
​
How do they work?
​
FROGS are designed to be air-dropped from a helicopter. These disposable units will transmit telemetry to a GPS equipped reusable rover until consumed. The rover is wirelessly linked to an on-board laptop which processes the data using our free EMD software. EMD can graph and log the incoming data from multiple nodes while outputting to KML format for viewing as a moving map in Google Earth.
​
What data is captured?
​
Telemetry includes temperature, pressure, humidity, air quality, preset trigger thermostat and IR (infrared) sunlight detection.
Why is this useful?
​
The main purpose is to calculate the rate of growth of a fire but logged metrics can also be used for fire behaviour analysis and model development. Ground crews can deploy a network of reusable versions of the device to sample conditions in an area of interest, data is collected using a rover in range on the ground or in the air.
What do they cost?
​
FROGS are priced at an affordable $99.99 each and the rover is a one-time cost of $194.99.
The reusable base version for localized sampling is $149.99.
​
FROG sensor deployment, a historic first!