Near Real Time Wildfire Monitoring in Chiang Rai Province using Mobile Phone Application

Abstract

The authors of this paper present a newly developed mobile application based on mobile phone’s Android operating system to monitor the wild fire occurrences in Chiang Rai province in near real time.The main components of the application are fire mapping, statistical displaying and emergency calling capability. The main data used in this applicationare active fire pixels or fire hotspotswhich are daily downloaded from Fire Information for Resource Management System(FIRMS) server operated by the Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to local GIS server in Far Eastern University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The downloaded data were filtered to have the active fire pixels geographically located within Chiang Rai province, classified by districts and sub-districts. Then, the mobile application will fetch the filtered data in every 5 minutes daily from the server to display the fire hotspot distributionusing hybrid Google map background, show statistical analysis and give warning to the mobile phone users.This application also has capability to calculate the distance from the user location to fire location as straight-line and along road paths.This application provides the possibilities to the fire fighters to work effectively. It support them to extinguish the fire in shorter time and safely. This application was introduced to the local provincial government organisation which has provided positive response and full support to apply it in the local community in district and sub-district levels in Chiang Rai province, which is very helpful to reduce the loss of the environment and air pollution due to wild fire.