Palaiologos Palaiologou

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

Abstract Α 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.

Wind characteristics and mapping for power production in the Island of Lesvos, Greece

This study investigated the wind characteristics of the island of Lesvos, Greece, with the objective of providing the necessary data for identifying the wind power production capabilities of the island. Weather patterns were examined using weather data from four Remote Automatic Weather Stations. Specific tools were used to produce the necessary windroses, Weibull curves and charts that helped to understand the prevailing wind characteristics. By using the tools of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the Wind Atlas Analysis and Application Program (WAsP) as the basic calculation platform, a wind map was produced portraying the wind speeds that prevail at a height of 10m above ground level. The results of the analysis were tested and evaluated with measurements from 15 wind turbine sites by creating six alternative scenarios. The optimum scenario was used to investigate the installation of a small wind farm with five wind turbines, of 3 MW total capacity.

Porting of a wildfire risk and fire spread application into a cloud computing environment

Effective wildfire management is an essential part of forest firefighting strategies to minimize damage to land resources and loss of human lives. Wildfire management tools often require a large number of computing resources at a specific time. Such computing resources are not affordable to local fire agencies because of the extreme upfront costs on hardware and software. The emerging cloud computing technology can be a cost- and result-effective alternative. The purpose of this paper is to present the development and the implementation of a state-of-the-art application running in cloud computing, composed of a wildfire risk and a wildfire spread simulation service. The two above applications are delivered within a web-based interactive platform to the fire management agencies as Software as a Service (SaaS). The wildfire risk service calculates and provides daily to the end-user maps of the hourly forecasted fire risk for the next 112 hours in high spatiotemporal resolution, based on forecasted meteorological data. In addition, actual fire risk is calculated hourly, based on meteorological conditions provided by remote automatic weather stations. Regarding the wildfire behavior simulation service, end users can simulate the fire spread by simply providing the ignition point and the projected duration of the fire, based on the HFire algorithm. The efficiency of the proposed solution is based on the flexibility to scale up or down the number of computing nodes needed for the requested processing. In this context, end users will be charged only for their consumed processing time and only during the actual wildfire confrontation period. The system utilizes both commercial and open source cloud resources. The current prototype is applied in the study area of Lesvos Island, Greece, but its flexibility enables expansion in different geographical areas.

Forest mapping by geoinformatics for landscape fire behaviour modelling in coastal forests, Greece

This study aims at quantifying and mapping fire-related characteristics of forest structure through field inventories, statistics, remote sensing, and geographical information systems in the island of Lesvos, northeast Aegean Sea, Greece. Simulation of fire behaviour requires forest biomass inputs that describe surface fuel types/models along with canopy fuel properties, such as canopy cover, stand height, crown base height, and crown bulk density, to accurately predict surface and crown fire spread and spotting potential. Forest canopy characteristics and other vegetation attributes were sampled and derived in over 100 field plots, the majority of which were located in coastal pine forest stands. Regression models involving four dependent forest stand variables (stand height, canopy cover, crown base height, and crown bulk density) were developed using generalized additive models. The values of adjusted R 2 were 0.72 for stand height, 0.68 for canopy cover, 0.51 for crown base height, and 0.33 for crown bulk density. These regression models were used to create forest fuel characteristics layers, which can be used as inputs to fire management applications and state-of-the-art landscape-scale fire behaviour models.

AEGIS App: Wildfire Information Management for Windows Phone Devices

Abstract Novel technological advances in mobile devices and applications can be exploited in wildfire confrontation, enabling end-users to easily conduct several everyday tasks, such as access to data and information, sharing of intelligence and coordination of personnel and vehicles. This work describes an innovative mobile application for wildfire information management that operates on Windows Phone devices and acts as a complementary tool to the web-based version of the AEGIS platform for wildfire prevention and management. Several tasks can be accomplished from the AEGIS App, such as routing, spatial search for closest facilities and firefighting support infrastructures, access to weather data and visualization of fire management data (water sources, gas refill stations, evacuation sites etc.). An innovative feature of AEGIS App is the support of these tasks by a digital assistant for artificial intelligence named Cortana (developed by Microsoft for Windows Phone devices), that allows information utilization through voice commands. The application is to be used by firefighting personnel in Greece and is potentially expected to contribute towards a more sophisticated transferring of information and knowledge between wildfire confrontation operation centers and firefighting units in the field.

Using transboundary wildfire exposure assessments to improve fire management programs: a case study in Greece

Numerous catastrophic wildfires in Greece have demonstrated that relying on fire suppression as the primary risk-management strategy is inadequate and that existing wildfire-risk governance needs to be re-examined. In this research, we used simulation modelling to assess the spatial scale of wildfire exposure to communities and cultural monuments in Chalkidiki, Greece. The study area typifies many areas in Greece in terms of fire regimes, ownership patterns and fire-risk mitigation. Fire-transmission networks were built to quantify connectivity among land tenures and populated places. We found that agricultural and unmanaged wildlands are key land categories that transmit fire exposure to other land tenures. In addition, fires ignited within protected lands and community boundaries are major sources of structure exposure. Important cultural monuments in the study area had fairly low exposure but higher potential for fires with moderate to high intensity. The results show how the spatial diversity of vegetation and fuels, in combination with vegetation management practices on private and public tracts of land, contribute to transboundary risk. We use the results to motivate a discussion of integrating transboundary risk assessments to improve the current wildfire-risk rating system and begin the process of reforming risk governance in Greece.