NEWS RELEASE
February 18 2002
UniSA
puts out a bushfire alert
Engineers
at the University of South Australia have been tracking down fires in the
New South Wales bushfire disaster area using rece3ntly developed software
that can find and count fires and determine what is fuelling them.
The
software is a significant improvement on existing available solutions and
could greatly assist in the many aspects of fire prevention and detection,
according to Professor Bill Cowley, Director of the Institute for
Telecommunications Research and leader of the small team who developed the
software.
“The
software can give fire authorities a good understanding of exactly what is
happening because it pinpoints where and how many fires are burning,
identifies what areas have been burnt and the areas that could pose a
potential fire risk. Images can be sent to Country Fire Service
headquarters on the Internet to assist them in managing fire operations
and reducing the risks associated with fighting fires,” he said.
The
software uses data collected by NASA’s earth observation satellite
called Terra, which has on board an instrument called Modis. ITR’s
tracking antenna and ground station, ASTRA, which can move quickly to
track low earth orbit satellites as they pass over, picks up the signal
from Terra and downloads data free of charge in a direct broadcast from
Terra to our ground station.
ITR
is a world leader in the research and development of demodulators, the
high-speed units that receive data from satellites such as Terra. ERSDEM-2
is the most recent demodulator developed and made by the ITR. Unlike other
demodulators that can only handle signals from one satellite, ERSDEM is
designed to receive signals from many different remote-sensing satellites.
One ERSDEM replaces a whole rack of conventional receivers and can
successfully decode signals from American, Canadian, French, Japanese and
Indian remote-sensing satellites.
ERSDEM-2
is now being sold to companies all over the world, including NASA where is
it used at the Goddard Space Flight Centre, giving the ITR valuable income
to support its research programs.
“Our
software can process the decoded data from ERSDEM-2 into images and have
it available on the Internet within 30 minutes of the satellite passing
over our ground station, and there are usually two passes each day,”
Professor Cowley said. “This makes it very useful not only for
fire-related applications, but for environmental applications such as
detecting oil slicks or algal blooms, and for assessing disasters such as
volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and drought.
“The
Modis decoding software automatically calculates where fires are burning
with a good degree of accuracy, although if cloudy, we may not be able to
get accurate readings. However, in the days of very high fire risk, we
don’t usually see much cloud.
“While
it doesn’t have great resolution, Modis has many spectral bands
including visible colours like red, green and blue and a number of
infrared bands. It’s like having 36 different images with each of the
bands producing a set of intensities. On the land we can look at how much
green vegetation covers a certain area and track how it dies off and
becomes brown, with the potential to become a fire hazard. Fires are
relatively easy to detect because they produce a lot of heat and intensity
in the infrared bands.
“Because we have our own ground station and equipment, we are ideally
placed to supply this information for local environmental benefit. If we
were doing this on a regular basis for the CFS, we would run our fire
detection algorithm to work out where the fires are and summarise the fire
pixels, the areas that are on fire. We are talking with the CFS to explore
the possibility of setting up an agreement between the University and the
CFS to supply this information for a small cost,” Professor Cowley said.
ITR is also developing some good applications for the Modis software that
could be used locally and nationally, providing important information to
scientists and government organisations. These applications include
finding areas rich in ore, weather forecasting, monitoring certain weather
conditions, mapping, and determining yield predictions in the fishing,
agricultural and forestry industries.
Media
contact: Geraldine Hinter (08) 8302 0963 or 0417 861832
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