Abstract
Real-time information about the spatial extents of evolving natural disasters, such as wildfire or flood perimeters, can assist both emergency responders and the general public during an emergency. However, authoritative information sources can suffer from bottlenecks and delays, while user-generated social media data usually lacks the necessary structure and trustworthiness for reliable automated processing. This paper describes and evaluates an automated technique for real-time tracking of wildfire perimeters based on publicly available “curated” crowdsourced data about telephone calls to the emergency services. Our technique is based on established data mining tools, and can be adjusted using a small number of intuitive parameters. Experiments using data from the devastating Black Saturday wildfires (2009) in Victoria, Australia, demonstrate the potential for the technique to detect and track wildfire perimeters automatically, in real time, and with moderate accuracy. Accuracy can be further increased through combination with other authoritative demographic and environmental information, such as population density and dynamic wind fields. These results are also independently validated against data from the more recent 2014 Mickleham-Dalrymple wildfires.
Highlights
Natural disasters, such as wildfires, have significant impacts upon human lives, critical infrastructure, and delicate environments worldwide
Recall is the number of wildfires detected by our estimator divided by the total number of wildfires
The difference between the categories 3.6 < d ≤ 13.2 and d > 13.2 is not significant (p = 0.96). The results of this analysis show that anonymized data about the location, time, and type of emergency call is sufficient to estimate evolving wildfire perimeters with high accuracy and low latency
Summary
Natural disasters, such as wildfires, have significant impacts upon human lives, critical infrastructure, and delicate environments worldwide. Information from ground-based sensor networks (e.g.1–3), high-resolution satellites (e.g.4–6), and airborne infrared scanners (e.g.7–9) all play an important role in wildfire emergency planning and response None of these authoritative sources, neither individually nor in combination, can be relied upon for real-time, high frequency, and accurate information about wildfire perimeters during an extreme fire event. Whichever data source is used to capture information about fire progression, binary maps of burned/unburned areas are used in many operational wildfire management systems (e.g., Vic emergency[13] and eMap14) to present the real-time progression of wildfires to responders and decision-makers. Wildfires are by nature more complex than a simple boundary, such maps have the advantage of being an intuitive representation of wildfires for a broad audience, including the general public Such intuitive information has an important role to play in aiding prompt and correct human decision making during an emergency. We argue that the approach is a valuable supplement to existing wildfire management systems
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