Towards an Integrated Cyberinfrastructure for Scalable Data-Driven Monitoring, Dynamic Prediction and Resilience of Wildfires
Altintas I., Block J., de Callafon R., Crawl D., Cowart C., Gupta A., Nguyen M., Braun H.W., Schulze J., Gollner M., Trouve A., Smarr L., Towards an Integrated Cyberinfrastructure for Scalable Data-Driven Monitoring, Dynamic Prediction and Resilience of Wildfires. In Proceeedings of the Workshop on Dynamic Data-Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) at the 15th International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2015). doi:10.1016/j.procs.2015.05.296. Best Workshop Paper Award.
Abstract
Wildfires are critical for ecosystems in many geographical regions. However, our current urbanized existence in these environments is inducing the ecological balance to evolve into a different dynamic leading to the biggest fires in history. Wildfire wind speeds and directions change in an instant, and first responders can only be effective if they take action as quickly as the conditions change. What is lacking in disaster management today is a system integration of real-time sensor networks, satellite imagery, near-real time data management tools, wildfire simulation tools, and connectivity to emergency command centers before, during and after a wildfire. As a first time example of such an integrated system, the WIFIRE project is building an end-to-end cyberinfrastructure for real-time and data-driven simulation, prediction and visualization of wildfire behavior. This paper summarizes the approach and early results of the WIFIRE project to integrate networked observations, e.g., heterogeneous satellite data and real-time remote sensor data with computational techniques in signal processing, visualization, modeling and data assimilation to provide a scalable, technological, and educational solution to monitor weather patterns to predict a wildfire's Rate of Spread.