As fire seasons in the U.S. gets hotter and drier, a new Twitterbot will show you if a wildfire is burning near your house, where the fire is headed, and if a plume of smoke is traveling in your direction by posting an updated time-lapse video and infrared images every six hours.
The tool, called @WildfireSignal, went live on Twitter on July 18. Scientists and programmers at Descartes Labs, a startup that processes images from satellites, designed the tool to pull a list of active fires from a government database, then clean up near-real-time images from the GOES-16 satellite at each fire’s location. Using the massive amount of data generated by the satellite, it automatically builds a time-lapse video of each fire and embeds it in a tweet with a hashtag of the fire’s name.
Someone evacuated from their home can use the tool to track a fire’s progress, information that can otherwise be difficult to find. Firefighters could also potentially use the service, though the startup’s next iteration–which will automatically detect new wildfires–will be more helpful.
“I think the real power in this is the fact that it [will operate] at night,” says Kontgis. During the day, at least in populated areas, it’s likely that someone might spot a plume of smoke as a fire starts and call 911. In the dark, when smoke isn’t visible and people may be asleep, the new service could be the first to notify firefighters that a fire exists. “What we don’t want to have happen is have a fire reported because it’s bearing down on somebody’s yard and they have to escape in the middle of the night without much warning.”