Space Apps Challenge 2018

Griffindores! | Spot That Fire!

Build a crowdsourcing tool for citizens to contribute to early detection, verification, tracking, visualization, and notification of wildfires.

According to Verisk’s 2017 Wildfire Risk Analysis, losses from wildfires added up to $5.1 billion over the past 10 years, and over 4.5 million U.S. houses are at high risk of wildfire.
NASA has a near real-time wildfire information database (Fire Information for Resource Management System, FIRMS), but it is neither widely-known nor easy-to-use for public.
Compared with NASA's satellite data, reports from public users can be more precise and immediate. Thus we combines these two resources in this "Where's the Fire" platform.

NASA's FIRMS database
- FIRMS provides a wide variety of wildfire data classified by location, time, etc. Since observed by satellites, wildfire in remote region can be recorded as well.
- Our project image shows data (South-east Asia, 2018/10/20 one-day data) from FIRMS.
Intuitive User report system
- Asides from data from FIRMS, each user's reports play a crucial role in our platform.
- To report data, users have to report his or her current location, azimuth toward fire, description, and photos. Current location is easily obtained through GPS on mobiles or wifi-locating on laptops. Azimuth toward fire is a north-based azimuth angle which is the relative direction of wildfire at the user's viewpoint. Descriptions and photos allow users to give more details to others.
- Once receiving reports from users, our program will then classify all reports into "fire events" based on our statistical method.
Wildfire prevention and alarm
- By locating wildfire spots, people living near these locations can take precaution in advanced to minimize possible damages.
- Authorities(e.g. fire stations) can use this website to get a rough understanding about how wildfire distributes in their jurisdictions when there's no complete observation data about the wildfire.

For residents living in wildfire-threatened area, this platform helps them take precautions earlier.
For NASA, this platform visualizes their scientific data to public and allows users to interact with it.
For those who are unlikely to be affected by wildfire. They can still understand the impact of wildfire all around the world, and raise the public awareness of natural disaster.

SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.