SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project will demonstrate feasibility for an innovative, interactive software product that will improve the Nation's fire fighting, prevention, and restoration capabilities. The product uniquely combines remotely sensed NASA data with a leading-edge weather model, delivers the resulting data to decision makers visually via the Internet, and creates previously unavailable data sets for use by existing fire simulation software. The FIREWISE project will develop a system that combines two components critically needed by the public and private fire fighting sector: (1) NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) active fire data products, and (2) Mesoscale Model 5 (MM5) weather predictions. Additionally the model which will include digital elevation models (DEMs), and near-realtime satellite imagery, will accommodate additional inputs such as vegetation and fuel type maps, existing geographic information system (GIS) data layers (e.g., roads, waterways, ownership. FIREWISE, marketed as a subscription web service, will allow users to select spatially and temporally appropriate data from archival and/or daily-refreshed data sources and visualize them graphically in 3-D with animation capability, allowing end-users to follow dynamic factors such as weather and fire spread through time. Additionally, FIREWISE will output data for ready ingest into existing predictive fire models such as FARSITE, a fire behavior and growth simulator mandated for use across the US Forest Service and US Department of Interior agencies. Three factors have combined to make fire risk a national priority: (1) global warming; (2) past management of fires; and (3) increasing development of the urban/wildland interface. Improved predictions of wildfire behavior have concomitantly become increasingly important to protect life and property. This proposed project will combine MODIS and MM5 data, and demonstrate feasibility for both visualizing and manipulating those data via the Internet and serving them to existing fire models and other end-users. The innovations include: (1) Visualization - by draping geospatial and weather data over DEMs, FIREWISE will provide 3-D visualization of fire hazards or in-progress fires, far superior to single layer, static GIS representations. (2) Data integration - FIREWISE will uniquely combine MODIS remotely sensed optical data with MM5 atmospheric model output to create new data products to predict fire hazards. (3) Data access and delivery - FIREWISE will provide fire decision makers unprecedented Internet-based access to the critical dynamic fire information. FIREWISE will improve the Nation's fire fighting abilities by enabling the rapid, data-driven decision making necessary to saving lives, property, and natural resources. FIREWISE will also enable educational and distance learning programs by making visualizations available on-line. Additionally, Native American student interns will be included in the FIREWISE development team

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II aims to prove the feasibility of creating a web-based mapping and visualization application for end-users in wildland fire management communities as an extension to the results of the Phase I work. By partnering with strategic vendors, the project will expand our current application to offer not only advanced remote-sensing data products and customized reports, but on-site, real-time weather data, GPS tracking, and full data transfer and communications networks (including audio and video). The project aims to ultimately provide end-users access to a complete team of expert analysts and engineers to gather, merge, and analyze fire-related data products through satellite communications networking. Our experts will then consolidate and simplify all the available data into custom, real-time data reports with geospatial context and delivery it to end-users to expedite high-level decision making, which can save valuable assets and lives. The platform will be amenable to the networking, visualization and analysis of a great number of issues in not only the natural resources realm, but also homeland security, disaster relief, global monitoring, and hazard mitigation. The ability to quickly and efficiently collect, analyze, and share geospatial data (in particular, time-sensitive environmental data) across the World Wide Web is the cornerstone value proposition for this product. These combined abilities provide a critical and as-yet-unavailable tool for the fire management community. The project has both economic and humanistic benefits in that confinement strategies decided-on and applied during the early stages of fires can significantly reduce the cost of fire suppression by several millions of dollars. This increased information will also allow decisions to be made that keep firefighters as safe as possible. Additionally the project will offer advanced data products in formats designed specifically to address the aspects that influence these decisions. The combination of the hub solution and web browser interface as a flexible architecture, is based on open standards and therefore is agile, dynamically configurable, and interoperable holding significant value for applications such as natural disasters, pandemics, or homeland security. The overlay and visualization of that data will provide analyses of critical importance for decision and policy makers, as well as regular citizens, all seeking the best geospatial information possible and in a form they can use