Subsurface hot spot detection across a 130 acre landfill

The challenge

Heat building below a landfill surface is worth finding early. Buried waste breaks down and generates gas, and a slow subsurface burn is expensive and difficult to deal with once it is established. From ground level there is very little to see. The operator wanted the surface read across the whole site while the ground was cool enough for anything warm to stand out.

The site

Roughly 130 acres of landfill surface near Spruce Grove, captured in June 2026, engaged directly by the operator rather than through a consultant.

Equipment and method

Radiometric thermal at 100 m AGL, giving a thermal ground sample distance of 13 cm per pixel, flown at 90 percent front and 85 percent side overlap so the thermal mosaic holds together across the whole surface. Pre dawn, which in June is the narrowest window of the year: the shortest nights mean the least time before the sun starts loading heat back into the ground. Covering 130 acres at that altitude and overlap inside that window is a planning constraint before it is a flying one.

Airspace and safety

Local airspace with an operating site below. Launch and recovery positions were set away from active tipping areas and plant movement.

Deliverables

A thermal orthomosaic of the full surface, and a print ready field data sheet indexing each anomaly so a crew can find it on the ground.

Result

The anomalies were located and handed to the operator in a form their own people could act on, with each one positioned rather than described. Early detection is the point of the exercise, and what happens next belongs to the operator's engineers.

Read more about thermal imaging