Monitoring and alarm method for wildfires near transmission lines with multi‐Doppler weather radars

Abstract

Abstract Monitoring and alarm play an important role in preventing trip‐out caused by wildfires for high‐voltage transmission lines. This paper proposes a multi‐Doppler weather radar‐based method for monitoring and alerting of wildfires near transmission lines. Firstly, characteristic parameters are mathematically proposed to distinguish wildfire's radar echoes. Then, the four‐site neighbourhood algorithm and the multithreading method are used to extract all possible wildfire echo units detected by various Doppler weather radars, and a cumulative probability is calculated to identify the wildfire. Finally, a regional block search method is used to quickly locate wildfire‐affected transmission towers. The membership function of spread time in the fuzzy set is proposed to determine the alarm level, which takes into account the influences of environment, topography, and vegetation on wildfire spread rate. The application to a provincial power grid demonstrates that the proposed method has an accuracy of 82.4%, a missing alarm rate of 27.4%, and a delay of fewer than 15 min. In addition, the joint observation of wildfires by multi‐Doppler weather radars and satellites indicates a promising application prospect for transmission line wildfire fighting.

Keywords

• power transmission lines
• wildfires