This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In early July 2026, Stanford postdoctoral researcher Alex Honeyman and graduate student Mark Leone attached a box the size of a briefcase to a fire truck in Colorado that was about to be dispatched to a wildfire 300 miles (480 kilometers) away. The box held a prototype array of air filters and satellite-linked sensors developed by Honeyman and Stanford colleagues to collect smoke samples and measure temperature, humidity and toxic gases such as carbon monoxide around the truck.
The devices provided the fire truck's crew with real-time data through a smartphone app, helping them decide what gear to wear at the scene, monitor data such as humidity and temperature, and even calculate the probability that sparks could ignite another blaze. Developed at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability as part of a larger project called SmokeCast, the app also estimated the likelihood that soils within 10 miles (16 kilometers) of the fire could release toxic metals when exposed to extreme heat. When the fire truck returned to its station 14 days later, the crew retrieved a cartridge of smoke samples from the box and sent them to Stanford soil scientist and biogeochemist Scott Fendorf's lab, where Honeyman, Leone and their team study how wildfires release metal particles from soil and distribute them over vast areas in smoke plumes.
Evidence that the soil composition where a fire burns determines whether and how much metal particulate ends up in smoke is relatively new. After the 2019 Kincade Fire in northern California's Sonoma County, Fendorf and colleagues investigated how wildfires can transform naturally occurring metals that are harmless when locked away in soils into toxic airborne particles linked to cancer and other health problems if people breathe them in. There's currently no way to monitor the metal content in smoke in real time or forecast where it will go as the plume travels, Fendorf said.
Widely used air quality ratings, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Air Quality Index, are typically based on the concentration of fine toxic particles in smoke known as PM2.5. "It doesn't tell you anything about the chemistry, and that is a huge gap," added Honeyman.
As climate change, decades of wildfire suppression and other factors contribute to more frequent and extreme wildfires around the world, smoke can travel hundreds or thousands of miles from its source. This information could help millions of people who now routinely experience unhealthy air from wildfire smoke. The SmokeCast team is one of more than 110 active projects supported by the Stanford Sustainability Accelerator, which is based in the Doerr School of Sustainability.
The team applied to the program for support turning foundational science from Fendorf's lab into a computer model that could someday provide a nationwide forecast of toxic metals in smoke. Gemma Guilera Ferre, a managing director at the accelerator who guides Stanford innovations in climate adaptation and large-scale data collection, pushed the team to consider how their research could be of immediate use to first responders. This inspired Honeyman, who spent 10 years as a volunteer firefighter, to prototype hardware—the box on the fire truck.
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