September 4, 2025

Wildfires devastate communities and cause billions of dollars of damages across the western U.S. NOAA Research is building a system to better understand the processes that drive wildfires. Rapid-deploy, mobile instrument towers that can be moved to collect data before and during wildfires is a key component of understanding these processes.

The Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) and three other NOAA labs, the Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML), Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) and the Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL) designed and built mobile towers with a suite of instruments that deploy quickly on location in conditions conducive to fire. These towers are part of the Collaborative Lower Atmospheric Mobile Profiling System (CLAMPS) which is one piece of NOAA’s fire weather observatories work.

ARL staff at its Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion and Special Operations and Research Divisions have extensive experience building and maintaining fixed towers that carry scientific instruments. With over 150 towers of different sizes across the country over the past couple of decades, ARL has much experience to draw on for this project. However, building these mobile, rapid-deploy towers presented many new challenges for the team in Oak Ridge, TN.

Each of the collaborating labs has expertise in different instruments so they worked together to decide which instruments would be best on the mobile towers. These sensors needed to coordinate with the other fire weather instrument suites on different platforms to collect a cohesive set of measurements. Each lab also instructed where on the tower to mount the instruments for the most accurate data collection.

To be mobile, the towers had to break down into pieces and fit, like a jigsaw puzzle, into the CLAMPS trailers. For rapid deployment, the pieces had to be light enough to be carried and set up by two people; they also needed to have quick connections and a mostly tool-free assembly.

The nearly 33 foot towers needed to be strong enough to carry about 40lbs of instruments at the top while withstanding up to 80mph winds. They also had to be rigid enough to keep the instruments from moving. A swaying wind sensor is not going to collect accurate wind speeds.

The towers also had to be durable enough to be moved, deployed and packed up many times, often in extreme weather environments. They also needed a few custom parts for “plug and play” installation of the instruments and custom parts and mounts had to be made to hold the instruments securely. On top of all that, they also needed to be safe for the people putting them together and taking them down.

The final result can be deployed by two experienced people in less than two hours using clear, step by step instructions the ARL team developed. A forgotten step could affect the instrument measurements or overall stability. It could also mean disassembling the whole tower to fix something at the top. ARL’s team created a checklist, much like a pilot’s pre-flight checks, to head off this problem. It is also the safest way to hand off deployment to people in the field, who didn’t design or build them.

The first mobile tower was set up at the National Center for Atmospheric Research Marshall Field Site in Boulder, CO for testing in July. For more information about the CLAMPS project, click here.

John Kochendorfer and Temple Lee (NOAA) test the directions to raise the mobile tower. Credit: Mike Rutherford (NOAA/ORAU)