Virtual Fire: A web-based GIS platform for forest fire control

A web-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) platform - named Virtual Fire - for forest fire control has been developed to easily, validly and promptly share and utilize information and tools among firefighting forces. This state-of-the-art system enables fire management professionals to take advantage of GIS capabilities without needing to locally install complex software components. Fire management professionals can locate fire service vehicles and other resources online and in real-time. Fire patrol aircrafts and vehicles may use tracking devices to send their coordinates directly to the platform. Cameras can augment these data by transmitting images of high-risk areas into the graphical interface of the system. Furthermore, the system provides the geographical representation of fire ignition probability and identifies high-risk areas at different local regions daily, based on a high performance computing (HPC) pilot application that runs on Windows HPC Server. Real-time data from remote automatic weather stations and weather maps based on a weather forecasting system provide vital weather data needed for fire prevention and early warning. By using these methods and a variety of fire management information and tools, the end-users are given the ability to design an operational plan to encompass the forest fire, choosing the best ways to put the fire out within the proper recourses and time. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.