Advanced Fire Information System
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) lead by the Meraka Institute and supported by partners such as the South African National Space Agency (SANSA), University of Maryland and University of Wisconsin Madison have been involved in the developed of the Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS) over the last 12 years. The original aim of the system was to provide near real time fire information to fire fighters, farmers and forest managers across Southern Africa based on Earth Observation satellite products from Terra and Aqua MODIS and the Geostationary MSG. With the launch of the system in 2004, Eskom (South Africa’ and Africa’s largest power utility) quickly became the biggest user of the system where more than 300 line managers and support staff all around the country would receive cell phone and email fire alert messages whenever a MODIS or MSG active fire was detected within 2 km of any of the 28 000km of Eskom’s transmission lines. Today the system has evolved in to a comprehensive wildfire information system that provides users with information and intelligence around the prediction, detection, monitoring and assessment of wildfires globally. EO satellite wildfire detections are complemented with both crowdsource detections from the AFIS Watchtower app as well as through automated in situ camera detection systems capable of detecting thin smoke plumes up to 20 miles away. Fire Danger models such as the Canadian FWI and Australian McArthur Fire Danger models have been fully integrated in to the system and can be produced for any area globally. A new MODIS burned area product has been produced by merging the standard MCD45 MODIS with the MCD64 BA product from Louis Giglo while a new Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2 algorithm has also been developed to provide higher resolution mapping of new fire events.
The visualization of AFIS has evolved from an online web viewer to a hybrid wildfire dashboard providing situational awareness for any region of interest. The NASA World View integration in to the dashboard has dramatically improved the visualisation component within the dashboard and now provide users with access to not only the Direct readout station data but also all the NASA GIBS data sets.
The AFIS mobile app is available on both the ITunes and Play stores and provides users with access to fire detections, fire weather forecasts and fire history through their mobile devices. The new AFIS Watchtower app allow fire managers to report the location of a new fire through their phone camera and is currently been tested by fire managers in Portugal.
The webinar instructions are below.
To view the event information and to register with your name and email, http://earthdata.adobeconnect.com/e8rwhfqnl9l/event/event_info.html
If you decide to register, on the day of, you would then go to http://earthdata.adobeconnect.com/e8rwhfqnl9l/event/login.html and enter your email address you used to register.
If you prefer not to register, you would just go to the url below, and request entry as a guest.
http://earthdata.adobeconnect.com/lance
