Quick Action

Given the investment in CITI infrastructure and industry partnerships, co-directors Dr. Eric Frost and Bob Welty were in a good position to provide immediate assistance to combat the fires. "When the fires first started, one of the huge concerns was that nobody knew where it was because the smoke was so heavy and the wind was so strong that aircraft couldn't fly," Frost said. "It was a real puzzle because the fires were in so many places at the same time."

Frost and Welty's team at the Viz Center leveraged their relationships and every available technology possible. The first step was to reach out to their contacts at NASA, which gathered data of the affected areas through satellite imagery provided by the MODIS group the Goddard Space Flight Center. MODIS satellites collect images twice a day from Southern California and, according to Frost, it typically takes NASA about 24 hours to process the data so that the Viz Center can use it to create map overlays with Google Earth or a special GIS tool called GeoMatrix Toolkit created by GeoFusion Inc.

The Viz Lab team got NASA to roll up its sleeves for the emergency and output the data in an unheard of three-hour window. "We connected with them and really pleaded with them and they were very empathetic and said 'OK, we'll pull out all of the stops," Frost said.

As the fires progressed and the winds died down, the Viz Center team called on NASA's Predator B-a larger, civilian version of the military's unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle-for flights over burn areas to acquire even more accurate and up-to-date visual data.

The Viz Center offered these overlays to emergency workers at the San Diego County Emergency Operations Center (EOC) so that they could get accurate assessments of where the fire was and where it was headed based on smoke patterns and vegetation surrounding the smoke. "We sent it to specific people at the EOC who are responsible for GIS during emergencies. We're trying to quietly be there in support while they do their job rather than trying to wave our flag an say 'Look at what we're doing,'" Frost said, explaining that as a result they are still waiting to hear feedback on what was useful to emergency staff during the height of the disaster.

Viz Center resources were also used to create informative maps from environmental sensors set by the U.S. Forest Service, lists of destroyed buildings, areas evacuated by emergency workers. Combined with the satellite mash-ups, all of this information was made available online to the public. The center also invited the San Diego PBS affiliate, KPBS, to work out of the lab in order to more quickly disseminate the map information.

"I think this is going to change the way crises are handled. Before (we got here) we were manually updating our own Google map. When I walked into this room down here and I saw the things that people were doing, it was kind of astounding," said Leng Caloh, managing online editor at KPBS, the San Diego PBS affiliate. "I thought, 'So it is actually possible to take the county data and overlay it over a Google map? OK, so how come this isn't automatically done in an emergency?'"