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December 15, 2020 —Did you know that there is no globally integrated fire reporting system to track and monitor forest and wildfires? Signal4D developed its Fire Zones solution to address this critical gap that collects, aggregates, analyzes, and delivers global forest fire and wildfire information from remote sensing, aerial observations, and on-ground curated available fire data sources.
Nowadays, you cannot turn on the news without hearing about the immense devastation forest and wildfires cause in the United States or elsewhere. The number and severity of forest fires around the world are increasing and the statistics are shocking. For example:
- In the United States this year to date, there have been almost 53,000 fires reported and approximately 10 million acres have burned (the second most in the last 10 years). California experienced six of the top 20 largest wildfires in its history.
- During the 2019-2020 fire season, Australia experienced an unprecedented catastrophic loss of human and animal life — over 30 human lives were lost, and it is estimated that over one billion mammals, birds, and reptiles perished in addition to hundreds of billions of insects – many rare and already endangered.
What is equally shocking is the lack of a unified global monitoring and reporting system to track forest and wildfires. While there are various groups that exist for this purpose, each manages its own monitoring system specific to a location or must report into numerous databases. As climate changes, and as a result forest and wildfires continue to worsen, it is imperative that an improved global monitoring and reporting system is available.
At Signal4D, we’ve looked at all these fragmented data sources and developed our Fire Zones solutions to help increase safety, ensure continuation of operations, and provide relevant fire data in a single and unified system. At a high level, Fire Zones:
- Collects, aggregates, analyzes, and delivers global forest fire and wildfire information from remote sensing, aerial observations, and on-ground curated available data sources.
- Combines information into a single feed using our proprietary technology and delivers the information by region via API as polygons for use in alerting and routing. We also can provide smoothed curves for display.
- Updates every several hours, with continuous monitoring for new information from identified or discovered sources for potential inclusion.
- Provides any meta data available about those fire zones (e.g., lat/long, type, name).
Signal4D’s Fire Zones solution is useful for maintaining safety (for property and plant as well as personnel), routing, and alerting. Our goal with this solution is to increase awareness of forest and wildfires, thereby increasing the safety of those that could potentially be impacted by a fire. Having a global reporting system will hopefully help minimize the significant impacts fires can have on people, places, and things.