visualization information

MODIS direct broadcast data were used during 2002 to detect forest fires.

I downloaded the 2002 IMSRs (Incident Management Situation Reports) from http://www.nifc.gov/news/nicc.html and extracted the incident tables. I sorted the tables according to fire size and cost to come up with interesting candidates for the animation. This table shows fires with an extimated cost of more than 8.5 million, the 7 fires with costs above 30 million are highlighted.

This table lists the fires burning the largest number of acres; the largest 5 are highlighted. One east coast fire makes this list. Most of the largest fires are in Alaska.

Mark Finco from the Forest Service RSAC in SLC sent Fritz a series of text files that contain MODIS-detected fire pixels. There is one file per day, with a list of all pixels that appeared to be fire pixels to MODIS. I ran a few tests to generate movies with a typical 'current fires are red and age to yellow' coloring scheme, which should work fine over the anticipated background of MODIS truecolor images. This movie shows the Rodeo-Chediski fire pixels:

0.2 MB quicktime

Using the same coloring scheme, I generated another test movie that covered the three most expensive colorado fires:

4.5 MB quicktime

I think a major problem with this data will be expanding the data to fill a reasonable amount of animation time, so I wrote a program that generates time-interpolated fires from the data from Mark Finco sent. The program looks at each fire pixel for any particular day and determines if there is a 'connected' path between the fire pixel and a fire pixel from the previous day. Here 'connected' means that you can find a path hopping from pixel to pixel where each hop must be shorter than some cutoff value. This movie shows the Rodeo-Chediski time-interpolated fire pixels.

1 MB quicktime

I plan to import these pixel into MAYA as particles to create an animation.

May 27

MODIS and Landsat combined test movie - this one has a background Landsat 7 image combined with the MODIS fire particles. The MODIS fire data which is available once per day is time-interpolated to 20 frames a day for this animation. A matching elevation still needs to be converted to geometry before these images will be imported in MAYA to create a 3D animation.

1.4 MB quicktime

June 2

Perspective view test movie - this pretty much shows what the fire animation will look like. The fire colors will likely be slightly modified in the final version since I forgot to render alpha for this test and had to use luma instead.

1.7 MB quicktime

June 6

Single frame perspective view - square pixels instead of round, and hottest fires are yellow. .

2.7 MB png

June 24

animation with 'randomly' shaped fire pixels. This animation also uses a different color scheme: bright red for current fires, fading to brown for burned areas.

1.1 MB mov