Space Apps Challenge 2017

Our solution:

https://ffff.spaceapps.jp/

Description:

Fire fighters need supports to oversee their surroundings. Especially, forest fire fighters on peat lands of developing countries, who sometimes work individually, have limited resources in terms of both extinguisher and information. Our project "F4" is aiming to provide easy-to-access information of fire location and wind, so that those fire fighters can use their extinguisher more effectively and safely.

Our project "F4" utilizes data for fire and wind integrated with on-site reports from fire fighters' mobile phones. Fire fighters in developing countries would have difficulties on access to high-tech gadgets, e.g. drone; thus, we limited our system only for PCs and smart-phones. A fire fighter can instinctively understand the location of fire and direction of wind on map with particles following local wind. Therefore, a fire fighter can be well trained after a simple lesson, "do not go into the region with particles flowing (or down wind regions of fires)."

Data for fire and wind are retrieved from open data sources. We use MODIS C6 fire / hotspot data for fire locations which is a product of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) boarding on Terra and Aqua satellites have approximately 1 km resolution with 4 micro meter and 11 micro meter radiation measurements for fire identification (Justice et al. 2002). We also adopt a wind forecast from Global Forecast System by NOAA which has information on both ground and ocean gust. With these two data products, we developed unique method to visualized wind near fire locations. Thank to "Earth" project (their Git page), we are successful to show the down wind region of the fire with Lagrange particles released at the fire location. As a result, our map can inform fire fighters with danger region indicated.

A fire fighter can report a fire finding and an extinguished fire from our web service. The system will record the GPS location and a type of report (finding or extinguishing a fire) with optional information such as photo entry and comments. This feature may allow fire fighters communicating over our map.

With our solution, we hope fire fighters could operate their mission more efficiently and safely. Because the influences by these fire fighters are not limited to their locals but connected to global environment, we wish to make our solution a step toward the healthier Earth.

SDGs:

Our challenge addresses the following SDGs' Goal and Targets.

• Goal 11.5
• Goal 11-b
• Goal 12-a
• Goal 13-1
• Goal 15-2
• Goal 15-5

Forest Fire cause big damage to sanctuary of biodiversity in Borneo Island(Kalimantan),
and to economic activities as haze.
As "El Nino" is concerned in 2017, we have to be prepared for Rainforest fire.
We are assuming this "F4" will be used with Hutangroup(Japan) and local NGO in Indonesia.
They also afforest the area.
*(Hutangroup's activities related to support Forest Fire Fighters, SDGs in Japanese)

Acknowledgement:

We thank to NASA and NOAA for open data products and "Earth" project for a basement of our app. We also thank to NGO "Hutangroup" (their HP in Japanese) for giving motivations. As a closure, we praise the contributions of local & HQ staffs of NASA Space Apps Challenge 2017 on supporting our project.

Code of our solution:

https://github.com/FavorForFireFighter/server-app

Data used for this project:

• MODIS C6 fire / hotspot data
• Global Forecast System by NOAA; with "Earth" project (their Git page)
• Mapbox; with Leaflet

References:

1. C.O. Justicea, L. Gigliob, S. Korontzia, and et al. (2002) The MODIS fire products, Remote Sensing of Environment 83, 244–262