 Every year thousands of acres of Southern California farms are wiped out by wild fires. That's why it's so surprising to see crews from the Los Angeles County Fire Department actually setting a blaze in the San Gabriel Mountains above San Diego Sea using a ground-based device called a Territorch and a helotorch dropping jelly gasoline come above almost a thousand acres of chaparral forestry. Odie Canyon, California, and last December. The goal was to prevent a larger, potentially catastrophic wildfire in this area of heavy, dead vegetation. But the controlled burn also served another purpose. It gave numerous scientific groups, including two from NASA, an opportunity to study the impact of natural fires on our environment. A primary concern is the effect of large-scale burning on our atmosphere. According to a scientist from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Joel Levine. We have evidence that certain gases are building up. We have evidence that climate may in fact be changing. It turns out that burning biomass, forests, vegetation, grass, shrubs is a very important source of a number of these gases that have very important environmental impacts. One significant gas produced by burning vegetation is carbon dioxide. Computer models suggest that if the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is doubled, the average temperature of the earth will go up three to four degrees. Result could be extensive melting at the north and south poles, causing widespread flooding in coastal areas around the world. Agricultural growing patterns could also be dramatically changed. Props now harvested in the Central U.S., for example, might only grow in Canada. To determine how much carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases were coming off the Lodi Canyon burn, Langley Researcher Randy Kofer, working aboard a fire department helicopter, flew through the smoke-blown collecting centers. These are currently being analyzed at the NASA Center. It might be some soil that's kicked up. Looking at natural fires from a different angle, 65,000 feet above, is another group of biomass scientists at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The key to their effort is a U-2 high altitude aircraft equipped with a sophisticated picture-taking device and a multi-spectral scanner. Looks like we do have some of the thermal activity coming through the smoke-blown. From imagery generated by the airborne scanner during the low-dive fire, NASA research scientists Jim Brass and his colleagues in the upper right-hand portion of the screen can determine significant characteristics of the blade, such as temperatures and other dynamics of the smoke-blown. What we're trying to do is develop a tool to predict what Langley collects, essentially. They know for a fact the types of gases and where they were collected. So what we do is we use Langley's data as what we call the ground truth, the basic information. We overlay our remotely sense data on the top of that and hopefully hooking those together and we can put a model together that may predict not only on a local basis, but a regional and global basis, what fire is actually doing from the standpoint of atmospherics. Studying forest fires an effort by NASA to assess the impact of large-scale burning on our environment.