Firemap: A Dynamic Data-Driven Predictive Wildfire Modeling and Visualization Environment

Wildfires are destructive fires over the wildland that can wipe out large areas of vegetation and infrastructure. Such fires are hard to control and manage as they can change directions almost instantly, driven by changing environmental conditions. Effective response to such events requires the ability to monitor and predict the behavior of the fire as fast as they change. The WIFIRE project builds an end-to-end cyberinfrastructure for real-time and data-driven simulation, prediction, and visualization of wildfire behavior. One goal of WIFIRE is to provide the tools to predict a more accurate rate of a spreading wildfire. To this end, WIFIRE has developed interfaces for ingesting and visualizing high-density sensor networks to improve fire and weather predictions, and has created a data model for wildfire resources including sensed and archived data, sensors, satellites, cameras, modeling tools, workflows, and social information including Twitter feeds for wildfire research and response. This paper presents WIFIRE's Firemap web platform to make these geospatial data and products accessible. Through a web browser, Firemap enables geospatial information visualization and a unified access to geospatial workflows using Kepler. Using GIS capabilities combined with scalable big data integration and processing, Firemap enables simple execution of the model with options for running ensembles by taking the information uncertainty into account. The results are easily viewable, sharable, repeatable, and can be animated as a time series. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.