Measuring rate of fire spread is an important component of wildfire and prescribed burn operations. Because there is often little time to install instrumentation ahead of a wildfire, rate of spread is frequently measured by observing fire passage through points of known distance. There is time to
install instrumentation when conducting prescribed burns, but current dataloggers have limited operating time and need to be reset if the burn is delayed or postponed. To overcome the limitations of existing instruments, Alberta Sustainable Resource Development and FPInnovations Wildfire Research Group asked the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Alberta to develop a new temperature datalogger. Researchers then tested these new dataloggers three experimental fires at the NWT Research Site.