Surely we have the technology to use infrared maping technology to identify suspicious “spots” of temperature changes indicative of supply and exhaust air ducts, etc., feeding underground bunkers. Surely we can pinpoint and destroy enemy power plants. And, I believe we should be able to identify any suspicious “hot spots” from heat ejection from emergency generators, and such.
Perhaps someone has more info on infrared and such technolgies, its capabilities, and its limits.
Would it have to see through the ground? Usually bunkers and such are burried deep enough to avoid exposure of Radioactive rays, which I’d think would be deep enough to hide any traces of their own heat. But I could be (and I usually am) wrong.
Yes, spotting he exhaust from a large generator is very easy if you know where to look. The problem is the same one you have with all remote sensing applications. You can go for a high or low resolution image source.
With a low resolution source you can scan huge areas and process the information fast, but the information is fairly poor. Every pixel might be 30 metres, and there’s simply no way that an exhaust vent from even the largest deisel generator releasing over a claypan is going to show up on such an image except (just maybe) at night, and with the use of chemical batteries it would be possible to shut down overnight.
With a high resolution image source the pixels can apparently get down to 50cm for MI sattelites, and some sattelites can actually produce near photographic quality images. Obviously these have a good ability to pick up small area temperature differences such as an exhaust would produce. The problem with this is that you need a large amount of time and processing power to interpret the information from even a small area. If the area you’re looking at is the whole of Afghanistan and the target is moving every couple of days, by the time your system alerts you to a potential area for investigation he’s probably already moved on.
Added to this a smart person could build a bunker whose exhaust vents into an existing village or other heat source so that detecting it would be impossible. It’s also relatively easy to allow the exhaust gases to cool underground prior to release so that the possibility for IR detection is decreased.
Basically remote sensing works remarkably well for long term changes, such as detecting the construction of a new village, where it doesn’t matter if the change is detected 6 months after the image is produced. For short term stuff like locating an active generator you still need a person on the ground to tell you what general area to focus on before you can put it to work.