Bush and Forest Fire Project

This project is addressing modelling, prediction, and data processing and delivery for bush fire and forest fire emergency response situations.

Demonstration fire simulation Applet
Fire spotter satellite data analysis Project
Data delivery systems for emergency response decision support
Using Satellite Imagery to detect hot spots
Bushfire simulation models

Using Satellite Imagery to Detect Hot Spots

	The GMS5 Japanese Weather satellite produces hemispherical images every hour at a resolution of approximately 4km per pixel. This image shows the visual channel with dark pixels showing areas of lowest brightness and white showing bright reflective areas.
	Thermal data can be used to identify hot regions. This image has been coloured artificially with the hottest regions coloured red, then green then blue and cooler regions left uncoloured. Dark pixels show hotter regions than white. Clouds can be identified as cold bright regions.

The following short movie sequence shows the four channels of data available from the GMS5 weather satellite: visible, two infra red thermal sets and a water vapour sensitive channel.

Firespotter Demonstration

Planning for coordination of emergency services is a challenging task that is of critical importance to state and federal governments. The systems presently available commercially are challenged by the need to integrate many data sources in a near real-time environment involving heterogeneous resources.

A problem area that is particularly relevant to Australia is that of fire spotting. High quality data is available from present satellite systems such as the GMS5 and NOAA satellites which provide coverage of the Australian land-mass and which can be used to provide decision support data products that will aid state and federal emergency response planners.

The OLDA program has developed a general purpose "middleware" infrastructure that is capable of integrating together spatial applications running on high-performance computational resources. We propose developing a demonstration of this system using thermal channel satellite data to highlight past and present areas of fire damage and risk.

The software system will be based on the client/server/server architecture developed under the OLDA Program, whereupon planners can access a graphical client through a Web browser, and which client program will act as their smart interface to a server network of specialist services running on high performance computing resources.

This work is being carried out under the On Line Data Archives program.

For more information, contact Ken Hawick or Paul Coddington.

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