The Australian Government has launched a new software called ‘Spark’ for prediction of future location of bush fires and to track the existing ones. The software has been built by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The software will give fire-fighting agencies a more accurate view of fire behaviour, informing decisions that could minimise property damage and save lives.
The new software uses current knowledge of fire behaviour and combines it with modern simulation science to predict the future location of bushfires and the spread of those already burning. The framework uses geospatial data, such as vegetation types, topography and un-burnable elements such as roads and bodies of water, as well as weather data such as air temperature, humidity, wind speed and wind direction. Spark then uses this data to model the spread of a fire based on its specific location and current environmental conditions.
Spark provides the opportunity to use data and modelling tools to inform emergency management processes, save lives and reduce the financial burden of disasters on the global economy. Spark has been developed as an open framework making it simple for fire agencies to incorporate the software into their existing systems. It also allows the fire science community to collaborate and keep adding new fire behaviour knowledge.
Dr. Mahesh Prakash, one of CSIRO’s computational modelling researchers, described the software as a highly flexible simulation environment. “Spark has the potential to be used operationally for real-time fire spread modelling of bushfires,” he said.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: http://www.csiro.au/en