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Californians Monitor Wildfires on the Web

December 12, 2008 By: Cyrena Respini-Irwin


In November, as much of the nation turned its attention to the approaching holiday season, California burned — again. Wildfire, once an infrequent form of devastation, is becoming almost commonplace in the southern part of the state. On November 18, Governor Schwarzenegger's office issued a press release declaring that "persistent drought and our changing climate demand a new readiness on any day of the year to battle a wildfire." The trend toward a year-round fire season is very bad news for residents, more and more of whom live in "wildland-urban interface" developments that bring homes and flammable vegetation close together.

But Californians also got some good news last month, as Pitney Bowes Advanced Concepts and Technology, in collaboration with Pitney Bowes MapInfo, released the beta version of FireLocator. The new Web site is designed to inform residents, government agencies, and the media about both current and historical fires. FireLocator was built with Pitney Bowes MapInfo's Envinsa location intelligence platform, and the user interface employs Microsoft Silverlight technology and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Information available through the site includes fire perimeters, detailed fire information, community-generated and satellite imagery, fire-related news, and multimedia content. Users can enter a specific street address, or a more general location such as a neighborhood or area of interest, and view wildfire proximity to that location. They can also check a thematic map, created with data from Pitney Bowes MapInfo's Insurance Risk Data Suite, which displays the potential wildfire risk ratings for different areas of California.


In this wildfire risk map of the Los Angeles area, dark blue indicates very high risk, and light blue indicates moderate risk.

Arthur Berrill, vice president of Advanced Concepts and Technology, explained that although the creation of FireLocator was "definitely altruistic," it also offered a research opportunity. "Advanced Concepts and Technology is, for all intents and purposes, the research arm of Pitney Bowes," he said. Berrill noted that in addition to learning about user interaction with the application, the research group also wanted to explore the possibilities of working with Microsoft's Silverlight Web plug-in. "We built Silverlight on top of Virtual Earth, which nobody's ever done before."

It seems the development team also broke ground in terms of content. According to Berrill, sites already existed that track hurricanes and other natural disasters around the world, but a metasite for fires was lacking. "It's an exercise in data federation . . . a whole collection of different types of feeds that had to be brought together in a sensible fashion."

Those varied data sources include the Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination Group, NASA's moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS), and photographs taken by residents (via Flickr, which is embedded in FireLocator). In addition, some 40 newspapers feed their videos, photos, and other news information onto the site.


An aerial image of the Sequoia National Forest from USDA's Pacific Southwest Research Station. The wildfires are mapped by measuring thermal-infrared light; the varying reds and oranges denote a range of temperatures.

The type of source affects how current the data is. Satellite imagery has to go through time-consuming processing before it can be used, whereas newspaper photographers equipped with GPS-enabled cameras can deliver content almost instantaneously. The company has plans to incorporate other sources eventually, Berrill said, such as imagery from small planes flying over the fires.

Another enhancement that may appear in a future release is an active notification system. Although the site currently serves "casual users" — those who go to the site and enter the address of a relative's home, for example — a greater challenge is creating an interface that would actively warn users in immediate danger. Residents would register their addresses ahead of time, and the system would notify them with a text message or e-mail when a fire front or smoke plume breached a perimeter set around that location. In another scenario, users could register multiple vital locations, such as a drugstore, relative's house, and daycare center, and a routing algorithm would calculate the best path while circumventing hazardous areas.

Even when those advanced features are incorporated, FireLocator will probably remain a free resource, said Berrill. "I don't think it's ever likely we'll make this a paid service . . . that's just not right when you're dealing with people's lives."

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