Fire Landscape Atmosphere Measurement EXperiment
Objectives :
A pioneering field campaign to characterize the behaviour of wildfires and the emission of smokes above the fires and their surroundings for :
- Improving firefighters and population safety to fire spread
- Assessing the exposure of firefighters and population to smokes
- Quantifying the impacts of fire emissions on meteorology, the climate, ecosystems, air quality and health
Methodology:
- Better understand of wildfires suddenly transition into extreme wildfire events
- Quantify the emissions and health- and climate-relevant properties of gases and aerosols from wildfires (e.g. concentrations, sizes, toxicity, absorption properties, transport)
- Improve and validate early warning systems, long-term monitoring tools and forecasting tools for fire behavior and smoke (new generation of satellites, emission inventories and modelling tools
- Evaluate innovative technologies and instrumentation in the field of wildfires and smoke plume
Planned observations
- Fire fronts, dynamics and propagation
- Plume injection and transport height
- Gases, aerosols and meteorological parameters in smoke plumes near active fires
- Pre fire: fuel characterization (load, bed depth, moisture, stratified sampling by vegetation class, litter/duff/understory separation, size classes, live/dead fractions, vertical distribution)
- Post fire: burn volume / height, biomass consumption, burn severity, vegetation classes, heterogeneity, unburned islands, smoldering remnants.
Key Components :
- Wildfire observation resources provided by Andalucian civil security agency: airborne platforms (drones) + portable meteorological stations + Forest firefighting personnel and operational support
- Addition platforms (balloons, ground based) + Instrumental playloads (surface, fire, gases, aerosol,
meteorological measurements) from research laboratories
Calendar
- FLAMEX Special Observation Period (SOP) 1 : Protocol testing Instrumental capabilities + first observational data => prescribed burns from April 27 to 30, 2026 (sierra de los Filabres – Andaluisa).
- FLAMEX SOP2: Observational data on wildfires on summer 2026 (15 July- 15 September)