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Wildfire Today

Tag: mapping

NPS maps and a few USFS maps available on your hand held device

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags 6 Comments on NPS maps and a few USFS maps available on your hand held device

Today the U.S. Forest Service published this on Twitter:

Being fond of maps, I had to check it out. The link takes you to a USFS website where they advise you to download an app for your smart phone or tablet. For Apple users go to iTunes and search for “Avenza PDF Maps”. At the Google Play Store for Android folks it is named “PDF Maps“. The app is free.

While there are many ways to obtain digital maps, one advantage of this system is that you don’t have to have a connection to the internet to use it. If you’re out of cell phone coverage and your device has a GPS receiver, it can pinpoint your location on the georeferenced map, but you have to download the maps first.

Since the USFS was promoting their maps on this app we checked to see what is available. They are sorted by region number. If you don’t know the number of the region you’re interested in, you will have great difficulty finding the map you need. Only three USFS regions have any maps listed. Their Northern Region, Region 1, has five, and they are all Motor Vehicle Use maps (MVU). The MVU maps are not pleasing to the eye and are not fun to use. The Rocky Mountain Region, R-2, does not list any maps under USFS/ R2, but if you search for “Black Hills” for example, a number of MVU maps show up for the Black Hills National Forest. The USFS Intermountain Region, R-4, has nine maps, all MVU maps for the Boise National Forest. The MVU maps are priced exactly what they are worth, $0.00. The California Region, R-5, has 33 maps listed. They all appear to be their standard visitor map and are probably very useful. They are priced at $4.99 each.

When you are looking for a map, not all of them are located where you would expect and there may be many more USFS maps scattered around the app in nooks and crannies. Searching for a map name might work better than drilling down by Category/Vendor/Subcategory, such as Parks, Forest, & Grasslands/US Forest Service R1/All Subcategories.

The USFS and Avenza need to fix this.

PDF Maps, Yosemite National Park.
Screenshot of PDF Maps on a Nexus 7, Yosemite National Park.

The National Park Service on the other hand has 127 maps available and they are all free. They are not extremely detailed. The Yosemite map (see screen shot above) appears to be a duplicate of the map you are given when you enter the park. It has roads, trails, communities, creeks, bodies of water, and facilities, but not much else. If you’re hiking in the park and get lost, you could pull out your smart phone and figure out where you are, even if you don’t have cell coverage.

There are thousands of other maps available as well. For example, USGS topographical maps at 1:24,000 scale are free, while there is a fee for the 1:100,000 versions. I saw some BLM 1:100,000 maps that were priced at $2.99.

The app can also measure distance and acreage, but it’s rather cumbersome. I was hoping that it could track your location every few seconds as you walked around an area, say, a fire, and it would calculate the size. But instead of tracking your location automatically, you have to move the cross hair to your indicated location at multiple intervals, click, and keep doing that until you’ve circumnavigated the fire.

There are no instructions that come with the app, and I could not figure out how to do the acreage calculation. The user interface, on this Android Version 1.0.2, is not super intuitive.  After a fair amount of searching I found some help on Avenza’s website. (Click on iOS or Android.)

What app do you use to compute acreage?

Here is the way the app is described at Google Play:
Continue reading “NPS maps and a few USFS maps available on your hand held device”

Better satellite imagery enables improved wildfire mapping and growth predictions

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , ,

Higher resolution imagery becoming available from satellites will enable more accurate mapping and spread prediction of wildfires.

Higher resolution imagery becoming available from satellites will enable more accurate mapping and spread prediction of wildfires. Since we created Wildfire Today in 2008 we have frequently displayed maps showing fire data collected by the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument package, such as the one below of the Falls Fire near Elsinore, California in August. The red squares represent heat detected by MODIS before the fire spread east across the South Main Divide and down through the bowl where the Decker Fire fatalities occurred in 1959. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Map of Falls Fire at 1:47 p.m. PDT, August 5, 2013
Map of Falls Fire at 1:47 p.m. PDT, August 5, 2013, showing heat detected by a satellite. The red squares indicating heat can be as much as a mile in error. (click to enlarge)

MODIS, launched in 1999 with its 1,000-meter resolution system, is starting to show its age. Better technology is now available and is orbiting 512 miles above the Earth on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite launched October 28, 2011 . The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the satellite is a 22-band radiometer designed to collect infrared and visible light data to observe wildfires, movement of ice, and changes in landforms. It has a resolution of 375 meters, much better than the MODIS. The new Landsat 8 satellite launched in February has a resolution of 30 meters for most of its sensors, and 100 meters for thermal infrared. This will be a game changer. In March we published a test image of the Galena Fire taken with Landsat 8.

Below is a comparison of data from MODIS and VIIRS. Click on it to see a larger version.

VIIRS vs MODIS
When observing wildfires, satellites provide different levels of detail, depending on which instrument is used. The image at left, produced from data generated by the MODIS instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite, uses 1-kilometer pixels (a bit over half a mile across) to approximate a fire burning in Brazil from March 26 to 30, 2013. The image at right, produced with data from the new VIIRS instrument, shows the same fire in far greater detail with 375-meter pixels (a bit over 1,200 feet across). (Image courtesy Wilfrid Schroeder, University of Maryland.)

Last month we told you about a proposed satellite, called FUEGO – Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit, which would survey the entire western United States every two minutes or less and could detect a fire that is about 10 feet in diameter. Assuming that the data from the satellite could be transmitted to the appropriate dispatch center within a minute or two, this could be a major step toward keeping fires small… IF the fire agencies have the appropriate initial attack policies in place and an adequate number of firefighting resources, both ground and air-based, to respond and arrive at the fire within the first 10 to 30 minutes. But since the cost of the satellite could be several hundred million dollars, it probably will never be built or launched.

Two scientists who have been working with some of the new data that is available now are Janice Coen of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and Wilfrid Schroeder with the Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland. They intend to transition the new refined spatial resolution VIIRS and Landsat-8 fire detection data and a new weather forecast-fire spread model into operations in the next two to three years. Mr. Schroeder told us that some of the higher resolution data should replace the MODIS data on the GEOMAC website in the next one to two months. In the meantime you can see some early versions of it on an experimental basis at a website they created.

The two of them recently published a paper documenting the development of a new wildfire spread model (think newer version of BEHAVE) that, coupled with high resolution numerical weather prediction and the actual location of a fire as detected by the 375-meter resolution VIIRS, predicts the fire behavior and spread of a fire, displaying it on a map. The model can be run after the overflights of the satellite every 12 hours using updated weather forecast information and the current location of the fire.

Their paper is HERE, and a description of the concept written by Ms. Coen is below.
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Researchers design satellite to detect wildfires — a step toward the Holy Grail of Firefighter Safety?

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , , , , 12 Comments on Researchers design satellite to detect wildfires — a step toward the Holy Grail of Firefighter Safety?

A concept for a satellite that would be dedicated to detecting new wildfires.

Researchers at Berkeley have designed a concept for a satellite that would be dedicated to detecting new wildfires. Decades ago we relied on a network of lookout towers staffed by employees and later volunteers who observed emerging fires and reported them by telephone or radio. Today most fires are turned in by residents or travelers with cell phones.

Dr. Gabbert’s prescription for keeping new fires from becoming megafires is:

Rapid initial attack with overwhelming force using both ground and air resources, arriving within the first 10 to 30 minutes when possible.

But if a fire is not detected and reported quickly, rapid initial attack is not possible.

This proposed satellite, called FUEGO – Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit, would survey the entire western United States every two minutes or less and could detect a fire that is about 10 feet in diameter. Assuming that the data from the satellite could be transmitted to the appropriate dispatch center within a minute or two, this could be a major step toward keeping fires small… IF the fire agencies have the appropriate initial attack policies in place and an adequate number of firefighting resources, both ground and air-based, to respond and arrive at the fire within the first 10 to 30 minutes.

FUEGO satellite
Artist’s concept for FUEGO on orbit (FUEGO Concept Art by R. E. Lafever, LBNL)

While the cost of the satellite could be several hundred million dollars, it could conceivably save money if it prevents a few megafires like the Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park last summer that to date has cost more than $127 million.

The real time detection of new fires is a very worthy goal, but added to this system should be the capability for real time monitoring and mapping of existing fires. The Holy Grail of Wildland Firefighter Safety is a system that could track firefighters on the ground AND the location of the fire, all displayed on one screen. This data should be available in real time to key supervisors and decision makers in the Operations and Planning Sections on fires. Knowing the positions of personnel relative to the fire would be a massive step in improved situational awareness and could reduce the number of firefighters killed on fires. This information could have saved 24 lives in recent years — 19 on the Yarnell Hill Fire and 5 on the Esperanza Fire. In both cases the firefighters and their supervisors did not know where the firefighters were relative to the location of the fire.

All of this technology exists. It would be expensive to implement, but it could save lives.