Every year fires cause extensive environmental economic damage, indeed woodland fires have an instant consequence tied both to the prevention costs, actively combating and post-blaze recovery, and to the commercial value of resources and destroyed raw materials.
Less likely quantifiable are the damages of hydrogeological type with the soil erosion, of devastation of the tourism oriented areas and ecosystem functionalities.
Fires are increasingly frequent in heavily populated areas, for example the suburban and coastal ones, where residences and economic activities are located in wealthy vegetation environments. In the urban-rural interface, such events are particularly difficult to manage and damages to people and things may be much more serious than the previous cases. On average, on the European field, over 65.000 fires that travel for about 500.000 ha (EC, 2014) are annually recorded.
Our project S2IGI, developed with our partners CNR-IBIMET and Aerospace Engineering School of the Sapienza University of Rome (SIA), will contribute to the reduction of damages caused by forest fires to the environment and to the economic activities through the development of an informative prototype system that integrates innovative techniques of data elaboration provided from new satellite technology and forecasts provided from high-resolution weather patterns.
S2IGI has as its specific objective the support for the operative activities of fire-fighting, via the realisation of systems and specialised software applications based on satellite technologies. These operative activities are very distinct and outlined on three phases:
Allocation on the territory of active fire-fighting resources on the basis of the seasonal and daily risk, in the pre-event process
Coordination in the active fight phases with the individuation of the outbreak of fires, and the monitoring and the estimate of the propagation in real-time
Estimation of the damage and quantification of damages in the post-event phase.
In correspondence to the three operative phases, the project is based on three distinctive industrial research lines:
– Software development capable to generate maps of:
Probability of fire outbreaks and intensity related to season climatic conditions and to the most frequent risky wheather scenarios
Economic exhibit of resources in the environment of urban-rural interface
Danger daily maps based on weather conditions and vegetation
Fuel maps
Vegetative and phenological state of vegetation
– Software development capable to:
Determine the point of “Ignition Detection” from the geostationary satellite
Predict the propagation of the fire line in real-time
Make available in real time the estimated weather data and the geo-synched data coming from the ground-based machinery, along with other data
– Software development capable to:
Control areas of the burned site
Severity of damage
The ultimate result of the project will be the development of an integrated software system, based on the elaboration of a satellite imagines plus other ancillary, weather data and also archiving of various elaborate information, able to present to the decision-makers and specialist officer to the activities the various maps and information described above in relation with the three phases of activities.
The portion of the system dedicated to the maps presentation will be based on web-gis.
