National fire alert and monitoring system

Since 2000 CONABIO has processed and published in near real time geospatial information of occurring wild fires in Mexico and Central America as part of the " Hotspot detection with remote sensing techniques" program. Currently the Fire Alert System receives via direct-broadcast raw data from MODIS (Aqua and Terra platforms) and VIIRS (NPP). This raw data is processed to L1A, L1B, MOD14, MOD13 and MOD11 products (at the moment we only process VIIRS to L1B). MOD14 gives us a Fire-Mask raster that has the coordinates of the thermal anomalies called hotspots (Giglio, 2003). Each hotspot represents a 1 Km squared polygon that, with nearly 0.9 probability, has a uniformly distributed fire. The system automatically publishes information of county level locality name, area slope, ecosystem type and closeness to the nearest "Natural Protected Area". The system also has a WMS service provided by GeoServer that stores thematic map layers of Fire Propagation Index, a NDVI time-series analysis model that measures vegetation anomalies, and Moisture Percentage Map, based on dead vegetation fuel and rainfall duration raster products. Every 24 hrs we process a mean of 6 satellite passes during day and night. Over time, the amount of data has surpass the original capacity of the system. Although the first generation software has been upgraded to accomplish the needs of users, specially fire fighters, researches and decision-making people, the urgent need of a platform capable of forecasting, performing complex analysis and integrating it with next generation data sources has turned the use and administration of the old system an awkward task. A next-generation system is being developed at the moment and the release date is expected by the end of this year. The system lies on a Postgres9.1-Postgis2.0 with raster support engine that decreases dramatically the processing time. The design of a software based on a spatially-enable database has opened a new world of opportunities. This system will be based purely on Open Source Software. Fire Alert System homepage: http://www.conabio.gob.mx/incendios/