News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

Software pinpoints fires at night

When last week's lightning storm pummeled the area around Sisters, a new tool helped the lookout on Black Butte locate fires after dark.

For decades, the primary mechanism to establish the position of a fire has been the Osborne Fire Finder. In the past, information from the Osborne has been plotted on two-dimensional maps, with the lookout using landmarks to pinpoint distance.

Normally, once it is dark and landmarks not visible, it is impossible to set location. The DragonPlot Fire Plotting System, developed in part by Sisters resident Tom Craven,  allows lookouts to pinpoint a blaze using only direction from the lookout (azimuth) and how far the blaze is above or below the lookout (inclination.) 

DragonPlot takes information from the Osborne and adds the "third dimension," distance, with three-dimensional mapping software, according to Craven.

On a laptop, the lookout can feed in data and DragonPlot uses a three-dimensional Earth model to establish location of the blaze, either with latitude/longitude coordinates or legal description (township, range, section).

Scott Brownwood, the lookout on Black Butte during last week's storm, was able to report six fires after dark on Sunday night.

"Scotty was doing something that was never able to be done before (DragonPlot): locate the position, at night, of a fire when he has no landmarks to go by. He was the only lookout on duty and able to report fires until 10:30 p.m.," Craven said.

"He had the technology that allows that capability, he was a lookout who knows how to use it and he was grinding away long after a lookout could say 'I can't help you any more.'"

The DragonPlot software has been in development by Craven, along with John Douglass, since the year 2000. Craven had spent a season in a lookout tower as a young man years ago. He worked for the technology firm Tektronix. 

Craven said that when he and Douglass had the original idea for the plotting software, Craven's research kept leading to Dr. Peter Guth. When he contacted Guth, Guth was immediately interested in the project and became a partner. Guth "codes the software," Craven said, which is being continuously improved with input from users, better maps, access to the Internet, and "contextual data." 

Craven said the software answers the questions, "Where is that, and what is there," including roads, flora, information concerning "what is important to fire people."

There are currently five lookouts leasing DragonPlot, according to Craven, in Central Oregon, Colorado and the Sierra Nevada of California. 

Another advantage of the system is that it can work with other electronic data, such as lightning strike maps. In one instance, a storm struck with lightning past the horizon for the lookout. By overlaying the position of the smoke under DragonPlot with maps of where lightning had hit the ground, a lookout was able to send firefighters right to the site of the strike to extinguish a blaze.

Their company is named GeodesyBase, Inc. Geodesy, Craven says, is the science of studying the shape of the Earth.

For more information, see http://www.geodesybase.com.

 

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