A small Redding company has created an online “wildfire viewer” that allows the public to see the changing perimeter of large brush fires in Orange County and the rest of Southern California.
ENPLAN produces the snapshot by taking data from everything from orbiting satellites to heat detecting cameras on aircraft to calculate the permiter of the fire, then overlay it on a Google map. The maps are being posted at www.enplan.com/fires.
(Click map to enlarge.)
“There’s a lot of information that’s hidden away in hard to use formats; we’re bringing it together and making it easy to read,” says Marc Pfister, technology manager at ENPLAN, a consulting firm that specializes in mapping and environmental impact reports.
Pfister created a version of the software for Northern California after lightning started hundreds of wildfires in that part of the state in June. The website drew lots of traffic, leading him to expand the software so that it covers all of California, especially densely populated Southern California.
The wildfire viewer doesn’t track smaller fires, like the one that occurred earlier this week in Newport Beach. And the perimeter information doesn’t represent real-time data. Information is downloaded from satellites only once every six hours. But the website is meant to give the public a sense of larger wildfires that last a day or more, and which pose a public hazard.
“We’re constantly fine-tuning things and may add red flag warnings to the map in the comings weeks,” Pfister said.
Follow Sciencedude on Twitter at twitter.com/grobbins
More ‘Dude
