Ultimate Exes - Space Apps Challenge

Ultimate Exes| Spot That Fire V3.0

Spot That Fire V3.0

Recent wildfires worldwide have demonstrated the importance of rapid wildfire detection, mitigation, and community impact assessment analysis. Your challenge is to develop and/or augment an existing application to detect, predict, and assess the economic impacts from actual or potential wildfires by leveraging high-frequency data from a new generation of geostationary satellites, data from polar-orbiting environmental satellites, and other open-source datasets.

D.N.A. of Fire

Summary

The D.N.A. of Fire (Detection, Notification, and Analysis of Fire) website is a tool that is modeled to provide users with the best data regarding wildfires in their vicinity. Utilizing satellite data and effective coding, the app will provide users alerts about any new fires, as well as estimate and visualize the economic cost of every wildfire occurrence in the region. In providing this data, the website also focuses on driving home the impacts these fires have on our homes, countries, and our world. With the help of visualization, it helps to increase awareness of this issue.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We created the Detection, Notification and Analysis of Fire (D.N.A. of Fire) in order to tackle the challenge at hand. This is a website located at the internet address http://exes.chojeq.com/ . This website has three parts that deals with the respective parts of its name - Detection, Notification and Analysis of wildfires.

In the modern world, wildfires are becoming a common natural disaster that causes destruction and loss wherever it occurs. The impact of forest fires is not limited to the environment and nature - millions of dollars are lost through the occurrence of the fires annually. This project aims to tackle the issue of predicting, detecting and informing individuals about wildfires and the impacts of it occurring.

The project aims to tackle the challenge through a three prong method:

Prediction and detection of wildfires occurring though satellite data provided.
Informing individuals about the occurrence of wildfires in their vicinity.
Analyzing and projecting the expected economic and environmental impact from the occurring wildfire.

First, the website takes data from NASA FIRMS in order to effectively predict and detect wildfire occurrences. Among the data utilized are the coordinates, temperatures and humidity of locations worldwide. Through the website, the data is analysed in order to determine the areas where there is a high risk of forest fires occurring. The website will then display this information visually through markers on a map of the world, providing the user with details of a certain location when it is clicked on the map.

Next, the website also has a section that requests users data about the location of their homes. This section of the website is dedicated to informing users about any potential or occurring wildfires in the proximity of their homes. The website will also advise users in risk to evacuate and proceed to the nearest shelter if a fire occurs. In addition, there is also a section of the website where users can report any wildfires they may see into the database. This report will be processed and the website will then blast out emails to users that live nearby the location of the fire to tell them to evacuate.

Finally, the website has a section to estimate the economic impact of any occurrence of forest fires. Using estimated values from past incidents of fires, the website will take into consideration the cost of putting out the fire, the value loss through the destruction of nature and impact of displacing individuals who live in the vicinity of the fire. Then, the website will calculate and display the average economic loss due to the fire. This hopefully provides an intuitive way to fight the desensitization people might feel towards forest fires due to overexposure of its frequency on social media.

Through this project, we hope to increase the loss from the occurrence of forest fires. We believe that through this website, we will be able to decrease the response time of individuals involved in any occurrences of forest fires. With analysis and providing an easily digestible visualisation of the costly impact of forest fires, we hope to increase the awareness and concern of the people towards this issue and fight the desensitization people might feel by only knowing the frequency of forest fires. This website will also be able to help people realize the impacts of forest fires in the long run, and hopefully motivate them to assist in the curbing of forest fires. At the end of the day, we hope that our project will eventually contribute to the progress of overcoming forest fires as a global problem.

How We Developed This Project

The project all started with a group of individuals declaring their passion for saving the forests. We realized that the dire effects of forest fires were much worse compared to what could be seen on news reports. The economic impacts of them are not little and affects individuals and countries globally. Thus, with this in mind, we decided to create the D.N.A. of Fire website.

Our approached began by considering the issue of forest fires as a whole. How do we detect forest fires? What were the necessary steps to take in dealing with them? And most importantly, how to convince people that these fires were causing much more damage than people realize. Through these questions, we decided on an optimal approach to deal with this. We made the decision to build a prototype app due to the realization of the efficacy of applications to gather and analyze data in the present era. In making that decision, we also considered how users were more likely to use a simple and effective tool rather than a complicated interface.

FIRMS data is preprocessed using Python and then integrated into the website with PHP and Javascript. The markup languages, HTML and CSS, are used to provide structure and style.

The area of focus in our prototype website is Southeast Asia, where any occurrences of wildfire will seriously threaten the rich biodiversity in the region.

Among the problems we faced included the collection of data for the economic impact of the fire. We were unable to pinpoint an accurate value of the economic loss involved due the volatility of fire occurrences and the multiple different locations and conditions a fire could occur. Thus, we resorted to past incidents of fires in order to estimate the economic loss through the fire.

Another problem we faced was the time constraint that came with the challenge. The team had to brainstorm, design, code and refine the project in a weekend, which was challenging given the lack of general experience of our team as students. In the end, we managed to plan a complete schedule that maximized our efforts in order to complete the project.

Our proudest achievement was completing the project. It was the first hackathon for most of the members of the team, so we were both excited and concerned with the short time span given for the completion of the project. Thus, when we finally looked at the finished product, we were all ecstatic and proud of what we've done. Truly, it has been a mind opening and fruitful experience for all of us.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Our project uses data from NASA FIRMS in order to predict and detect wildfire occurrences. The data taken from the website included the fire radiative power (FRP), latitude and longitude. The data was put through a series of codes that analysed the data in order to asses the risk of fires occurring at the location.