Sonoma Air Attack 2009/07/31

On Friday, we continued our visit with stops at CAL FIRE Sonoma Air Attack Base and the St. Helena Emergency Command Center (ECC) which allocates resources to incidents in the Sonoma-Lake-Napa Region.

Sonoma Air Attack 140 overflew three fires and took more than 20 aerial photos with the GeoCam Mobile G-1 phone. We were able to view some of the photos in the GeoCam Share map at the Emergency Command Center in St. Helena just a few minutes after they were taken.

However, for many of the photos the downlink was delayed and we lost the position data due to a critical interface bug in the phone software (we figured out what happened and have a workaround, but will be modifying the interface to prevent this happening again!).

Many thanks to Chris Jurasek and Brian Combs of Air Attack 140 for taking the time to snap the photos and dwell over a cell tower to downlink them. Thanks also to Tim Streblow, Joe Petersen, Tom Knecht, and the rest of the ECC staff for hosting us.


The Morgan Fire as seen from AA140 flying at 2500', taken by the pilot with the GeoCam Mobile software on the G-1. The camera was aimed to the right as the plane circled clockwise above the fire. (Credit: CAL FIRE / Brian Combs).
A tanker drops fire retardant on the Morgan Fire. (Credit: CAL FIRE / Brian Combs)
Observer Chris Jurasek, sitting behind the pilot. (Credit: CAL FIRE / Brian Combs)
Joe Petersen (left) and Tim Streblow (right) discussing resource positioning at the ECC operations map magnet board.
Tom Knecht at a dispatch console in the ECC. The GeoCam Share map is displayed to his left.

Sonoma Air Attack 2009/07/30

GeoCam is visiting CAL FIRE Sonoma Air Attack Base (SAAB) near Santa Rosa Thursday and Friday, July 30-31, to beta test the current version of our software in our first real deployment of 2009.

On Thursday we met the staff, got introduced to their operation, and enjoyed some great home-cooked food at lunch. The planes did not fly any missions, with no major fires in the cool weather.


Sonoma Air Attack 140, an OV-10 Bronco observation aircraft

Control panel on the OV-10

Schematic of the OV-10

Sonoma T-85, an S2T Turbo Tracker tanker. Tanker pilot Jimmy Barnes (left) is talking to GeoCam research assistant Lanny Lin (middle) and OV-10 pilot Brian Combs (right). Lanny is here on a summer internship from BYU.