Building Operational Systems to Suppot Fire Services
- Paper number
IAC-06-B1.4.02
- Author
Mr. Gonzalo Martin-de-Mercado, INSA, Spain
- Coauthor
Mr. Bruno Greco, European Space Agency/ESRIN, Italy
- Coauthor
Mr. Jose Maria Cruz Gomez, INSA, Spain
- Year
2006
- Abstract
During last decade, many initiatives have intended to provide fire fighting authorities with tools focusing on the enhancement on their decision making effectiveness, oriented towards two ways: the generation of fire products based on Earth Observation (EO) satellites and the implementation of decision support systems (DSS) that tried to demonstrate the utility of these fire products.
Most of these uncoordinated actions concluded explaining how useful could be the development of a true operational system taking advantage of the whole aforementioned initiatives, but a dedicated space system to observe wild fires did not materialise so that people fell sceptic with the feasibility of such services; however, the recent advent of the latest generation of EO missions have enabled the prototyping of new near operational services covering partially the requirements of forest-fire fighting users.
The proposed system supporting such services is composed of four main elements: Real-time EO satellite reception facilities, automatic real-time remote sensing data processors, distribution elements and flexible GIS-based DSS tools able to receive automatically EO products from the server side and manage them, offering a fully integrated and customised service.
On the side of the processors, fully automatic toolboxes implementing all the necessary elements to handle MSG/SEVIRI (every 15 minutes) and TERRA-AQUA/MODIS (4 times a day) data in real-time have been prototyped to generate fire based products. MODIS fire processing effectiveness had already been demonstrated in the past, while MSG/SEVIRI processing is a new and promising technique whose aim is to compensate MODIS temporal gaps.
Related to the user side, DSS systems have been built merging EO data processing, resource positioning and satellite communication technologies to derive value-added information management, again in near real time conditions. The flexibility and modularity of the DSS developed allow the implementation of new functionalities exploiting a step further the information stored in local databases, i.e. water discharge optimisation models or fire evolution simulations.
In the middle of both ends, the distribution system proposed automatically disseminates the generated products from the processors among the users through the DSS, providing the differential value-added capability of being permanently up-to-date in near real-time.
The proposed assets can be used to set up end-to-end chains, covering from EO data acquisition to integration of information at user premises. As an example, the system set up to support the commercial service given to the Spanish National Environment Service (DGB) is presented.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-06-B1.4.02.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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