The GeoCam Project aims to build a network of citizen disaster responders out of people helping people every day. Much of our work to date has focused on using GPS-enabled cell phones to help disaster responders share geotagged photos and other map data. The project is funded by Google and the team works at NASA Ames Research Center.
[This is a guest post by our friend Tom Zajkowski . We can't pronounce his name, so we stick with “Tom Z”.] My name is Tom Zajkowski. I am a Remote Sensing Analyst with the Remote Sensing Applications Center located in Salt Lake City. Trey asked me to deploy with GeoCam to the Guiberson Fire to serve as a liaison between his team and the CAL FIRE Incident Command Team managing the fire.
The Remote Sensing Applications Center, part of the US Forest Service, continually works with NASA to evaluate technology that can help the FS and other land management agencies fulfill their mission. We always seem to begin with fire applications as they elicit the most interest from management and the public. GeoCam certainly has fire applications, and it can also be used in other applications within the FS, like recreation planning and resource management.
Screen shot of the GeoCam Share map of the Guiberson Fire, as viewed in Google Earth.
I was impressed with the GeoCam utility. As Trey has posted previously there were some issues but that is to be expected on a first or even second deployment. As you can see from the map we were able to collect images from all over the fire. We got a lot of excellent feedback from the fire fighters that will allow us to build on this experience for our next deployment.
I was able to get one of the phones from Trey which I will use to develop a training pamphlet and a brief so that we can help firefighters learn how to use GeoCam before they get to the fire and to evaluate the utility of GeoCam in day-to-day land management applications.
GigaPan is another project we work on in the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames. The Gigapan camera is a simple robotic platform for capturing very high-resolution (gigapixel and up) panoramic images from a standard digital camera.
GigaPan can be used to collect panoramas that cover a broad area of terrain at very high detail. That's great for before-and-after shots of post-disaster damage. For example, the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project collected panoramas covering many of the walls in Yosemite National Park. These will be used as "before" images to help estimate the volume of fallen rock after future landslides.
This panorama, taken from a hilltop near Grimes Canyon Road, was stitched together from about 500 photos that took 40 minutes to collect. It covers a broad area of vegetation burned by the Guiberson fire. We hope the information will help guide rehabilitation efforts. For example, landslides are a concern after a fire in rugged terrain like this, and firefighters can take steps to avoid them like installing hardware to guide stormwater runoff.
One technical note -- the camera skipped two frames in the upper right of the GigaPan and we filled the holes in with sky so that the panorama would stitch. As a result the tops of some distant hills have been cut off. The problem is pretty obvious when you see it. None of the other data is suspect as far as we know.
This GeoCam photo covering a broad area of fire damage will be used to help guide post-fire rehabilitation efforts (credit: Scott Quirarte / CAL FIRE).
Our console in the Situation Unit room. At top is a geotagged photo viewed as a billboard in Google Earth. At bottom is a 2D map in a browser.
Today the fire continued to wind down, but we had several repeat users from yesterday asking to use the phones again. We collected 40 more geotagged photos with 6 phones issued to field observers spread across the Fire Behavior, Damage Assessment, and Rehabilitation Groups.
Fire behavior predicts how the fire will spread based on factors like fuel and weather. Damage assessment estimates the cost of the fire, often documenting property damage with local landowners. Rehabilitation plans to minimize the after-effects of the fire and the response, things like repairing roads damaged by heavy trucks and shoring up soil to prevent landslides. All these groups use field observers and we think GeoCam can help with all of them.
Today we got some great feedback that will help us improve the system:
GIS Specialist Todd Tuggle advised us to deprioritize the goal of making a local GeoCam server work stand-alone on a LAN without relying on connectivity to the rest of the Internet. He says the network has become so important to their operations that they pretty much always invest the resources to make it happen (at least at "project fires" that keep growing past initial attack). If we follow his advice it will greatly simplify our software development.
We successfully exported Friday's photo positions as points in an ESRI shapefile that their GIS tools could read in, and the GIS guys said they expect it to be a huge time saver for them when constructing maps. They are also really excited about allowing field observers to select icons from the fire symbology.
An important issue we were unaware of is the approval process for new map data. Typically all new data needs to be approved by both the Sit Unit Leader and the branch or division chief for that area. In the future we'll need to provide separate views of "approved data" (for all responder personnel) and "all data" (restricted to folks involved in the approval process). This is to prevent people on the line from making decisions based on bad data.
Several field observers told us battery life is a problem on the phones. We may invest in booster packs that can charge our phones from the AA batteries that are found everywhere in fire camps.
We'll demobilize tomorrow. Thanks a lot to everyone at the fire for giving GeoCam a try, especially our host Buddy Bloxham, Chief Lewin, and our "fixer" Tom Zajkowski who was a huge help with everything!
This GeoCam photo shows the challenges of the Guiberson Fire: rough terrain made access difficult as the fire threatened power lines and oil rigs (credit: Chris Waters / CAL FIRE).
For the first time, GeoCam phones were used for post-fire damage assessment (credit: Chris Waters / CAL FIRE).
Today we distributed seven GeoCam phones to field observers at the Guiberson Fire and collected 55 photos. Rob Lewin, the incident commander, reviewed our interface and gave us his take on what CAL FIRE wants from new sensor technology -- the most important thing is that we produce the right kind of high-level map for them to use in planning operations.
Unfortunately, we arrived at the fire too late for our information to really impact their planning process. Barring major weather changes most of the crew here will demobilize by Sunday. As activity dies down we're still figuring out whether we'll return to Ames or try to engage in post-damage activities on this and the Station Fire for a few more days.
In the morning we watched Aerovironment test their Puma aircraft, trying to use its thermal IR camera to trace the fire line. Here we see prep for launch near the ground station.
Some other events today:
Many thanks to Chris Waters' crew in Fire Behavior and Nancy Parson and Geovani Stoute in Damage Assessment for testing out the phones. We'll also be talking to folks in the post-fire rehabilitation crew tomorrow.
Todd Tuggle and Jennifer Valdez in the GIS mapping trailer are advising us on how to export data from GeoCam Share to an ESRI shapefile format their tools can read in.
Tim Ball, a thermal infrared analyst and helicopter pilot out of Reno, took one of the phones up in his helicopter to evaluate. He explained how he reduces his data collection process to the very barest essentials that can produce the data product the IC wants, namely a registered map of hot spots. Hopefully GeoCam can be stripped down a lot as well after we get more experience.
Our host, Sit Unit Leader Buddy Bloxham, had a lot of insightful comments. He was impressed that field observers could learn to use a GeoCam phone in five minutes. He also reinforced the importance of some of our key goals -- focus on ease of use, cutting down the admin time required to set up an incident (when the crew is at its busiest), and ability to view other products like track logs in the map. IC Rob Lewin said it would really help to enable sharing of quick natural drawings on a map.
Today I drove down from San Francisco to a hotel in Newbury Park, ready to deploy GeoCam phones to the Guiberson Fire tomorrow morning.
Our friend Tom Zajkowski from the US Forest Service is acting as liaison with our host, Buddy Bloxham, the Sit Unit Leader from CAL FIRE Incident Command Team 10. Lanny Lin, who interned with GeoCam this summer, is flying in from BYU to help. We'll have 9 GeoCam phones altogether and will get as many as possible in the hands of field observers on the ground and aircraft crew.
On Thursday Chris Jurasek's crew took several GeoCam photos from Air Attack 140 over the Lockheed fire, which has ramped up very quickly to a type 1 response. Our friend Francis Enomoto at Ames saw the smoke plume on his drive in this morning.
So far we haven't had any contact with the IC on the fire, so we don't know if they've accessed the GeoCam Share server to look at the data. We're hoping that some of the folks we know from the Sonoma/Lake/Napa Unit will deploy down there so there's a better chance to put GeoCam into action.
Two photos taken around 12:30 Thursday at the Lockheed fire, probably from 4500'. (Credit: AA 140 crew / CAL FIRE).
[This is a guest post by our visitor Kurt Schwehr kurt@ccom.unh.edu.]
Before getting into the details, I want to thank the gracious staff of CAL FIRE for taking the time to talk with us and suffering through my barrage of questions with well-spoken answers. This group is top notch. After living in California for most of my life, I know I owe these folks a lot for all their dedication and hard work.
I am away from my normal office at the University of New Hampshire to be out at NASA Ames for a week and half to collaborate with the GeoCam team. The GeoCam project, lead by Trey Smith, is similar to a number of ways to projects that I work on. They use the G-1 Phone with Google Android to upload tactical information from CAL FIRE personnel in the field (specifically geotagged images with position, orientation, and notes), which are then displayed on web interfaces and inside of Google Earth. This is very similar to what I would like to see be available for the marine debris, oil spill, and whale location teams in NOAA. I am also interested in mobile applications that allow creation of content for products like the GeoCoastPilot – a 4D interactive port visualization used by mariners before entering a port. Collaboration and cross-pollination is even easier in that both the GeoCam team and I use Python, Django, and Google Earth. The python usage in the GeoCam team might be partly my fault from when I worked in the same building at NASA Ames in the mid to late 90’s.
On Friday, Trey, Alex Roederer and I went to north of the San Francisco Bay to visit two CAL FIRE installations as a part of the GeoCam project. The GeoCam team was delivering phones to these sites and training the staff how to use them. For me, it was a chance to see the phones, training, and most importantly the operations of the CAL FIRE staff. The CAL FIRE team has one key property that NOAA’s response teams do not have – CAL FIRE responds to huge number of incidents during fire season in a small area (California). NOAA’s teams respond all over the country and sporadically as incidents occur infrequently.
Our first stop was the CAL FIRE Air Attack Station in Sonoma, CA. This facility houses two S2T Turbo Tracker tankers and an OV-10 observation plane. Trey described these planes in a previous post and he has some excellent pictures of the OV-10 (Air Attack 140). You can read more about the history of the planes use for fire fighting in California in the CAL FIRE aviation history writeup.
OV-10 observation plane (left) and S2T tanker staged on the tarmac ready for operations.
Alex and I got a tour of the S2T (T-85). Where as the OV-10 circles overhead providing coordination, this plane delivers fire retardant right in front of fires from 100-150 feet over the ground at 150 knots (172 mph). We got an explanation of how the plane operates while sitting in the pilot and copilot seats. That makes it all very real. Before getting in the plane, we were instructed exactly what not to touch as the plane was ready to go for fire fighting.
Kurt (left) and Alex (right) in the cockpit of the S2T Air Attack 85.
Once inside the cockpit, the most striking thing is how low tech the controls are. There are no map displays and the only electronic displays are at most a couple of rows of text. I’ve become used to seeing radar and automatic identification system (AIS) chart display systems on ships that show what is around. The aircraft has a GPS with a text display and a TCAS that displays the identity of aircraft around, but requires scrolling through the list of planes. This identification display is even more restricted than the minimum keyboard display (MKD) that mariners have concluded is almost useless. However, in this case, the pilots are being directed from overhead by the controller in the OV-10 observation plane, so it’s less important to have this as a map display. Navigation is done on paper charts on the team’s kneeboards. The S2T has bubble windows in the cockpit, so it is possible to put your head outside of the frame and see straight down or behind the plane.
We did not get as much time with the OV-10 as it was in the middle of some quick tire work to get it rapidly back into service. These impressive observation platforms saw service in Vietnam. The visibility appears to be even better than that found in the S2T. These guys are monitoring and able to talk on up to 6 radio frequencies at the same time. They have to be communicating with the fire fighters on the ground, the helicopters, the S2T tankers, approaching aircraft, and the operations centers.
GeoCam Mobile G-1 image from the back seat position in the OV-10 as the plane crosses Lake Berryessa on the way to an incident.
We got a look at the dispatch center for the air operations in Sonoma. These are the people who oversee the reading of planes and send them off to fight the fires based on the requests sent from the command center. View of the tarmac from the dispatch center.
When the call comes in with a location, the team uses the computer to generate a range and bearing. They use the wall mounted maps to double check the computer. They send the range and bearing along with a longitude and latitude allowing the pilots to also double check. The secondary map for range and bearing used to cover all of California.
The officer in charge spent quite a while with us explaining how the team coordinates operations both in the office and on-site. For on-site, they have a relatively new strategy to ensure everyone is safe. It starts with an outer ring where an approaching fire fighting aircraft reports in to the observer. If the craft does not hear anything, they can proceed to a next ring a number of miles out. At this ring, they have to hold in an orbit if they do not hear from the observation plane. Once they have been called into the fire scene, they have to enter one of three levels based on the aircraft type. Closest to the ground is the region where the helicopters operate. Above that is an altitude range for the S2T tankers to orbit awaiting instructions to attack the fire. At the top/highest altitude is where the OV-10’s orbit in an opposite direction from the tankers. By orbiting in opposite directions, they are only in a each others blind spots for a fraction of a second on each pass. When a new OV-10 observation team enters the scene, they pull up on the observer plane that has been before and orbit together passing operational information with both observers having almost the same perspective.
Tom Knecht at one of the 5 command desks at the St. Helena command center.
After spending the first half of the day with Sonoma Air Attack, we headed over the hills to the Sonoma/Lake/Napa Emergency Command Center in St. Helena. This center was recently upgraded to give each station 4 to 5 separate computers to handle all of the IT needs in addition to the radios they are using to coordinate operations. While we never hope that there are fires, a fire called in just after we arrived was a good opportunity to see how they handle the initial moments of an incident. We heard the 911 call for a fire from someone’s cell phone with a very vague description of the location of the fire. A team of three discussed what the caller meant by the place names the person used. They combined computer searches, Google Earth, and traditional maps to quickly come to agreement as to the location. It turned out to be in the operational area of the command center to the north, so the team crisply handed off the operations to the neighboring center.
Trey training CAL FIRE staff how to collect images and notes with the GeoCam Mobile application.
After the fire handoff, the team was able to rotate team members outside to Trey and Alex for training on the GeoCam phones that the CalFire folks are testing. The most notable moment of the training came at the end of the session where several Captains remark how easy it was to figure out how to use the phone with the GeoCam application.
Inspecting images collected with a GeoCam Mobile G-1 phone in the Google Earth view of the GeoCam Share database.
My name is Tom Zajkowski. I am a Remote Sensing Analyst with the Remote Sensing Applications Center located in Salt Lake City. Trey asked me to deploy with GeoCam to the Guiberson Fire to serve as a liaison between his team and the CAL FIRE Incident Command Team managing the fire.
Screen shot of the GeoCam Share map of the Guiberson Fire, as viewed in Google Earth. 
