The NWA May Webinar will be held on Wednesday, May 3, 2017 at 1 pm CT/2 pm ET.
Go-To-Webinar: please click here to register
Title: Wildfire Detection Notifications for Impact-Based Decision Support Services in Oklahoma Using Geostationary Super Rapid Scan Satellite Imagery
Presenters: Todd Lindley (primary) and Aaron Anderson (secondary), WFO Norman
Description: On 18 February 2016, wildfires burned 524.80 km2 (129 682 ac) and damaged or destroyed 656 structures across Oklahoma. During this high-impact fire episode, meteorologists at the Norman, Oklahoma, National Weather Service Forecast Office leveraged experimental 1-min Geostationary Operational Environment Satellite-14 (GOES-14) imager super rapid scan operations for GOES-R (SRSOR) in concert with a text messaging-based notification tool within the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) to alert officials of remotely sensed wildfire hot spots. These notifications allowed Oklahoma Forestry Services and Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management to rapidly deploy local firefighting resources to the site of newly detected wildfire ignitions—in some instances before emergency 911 calls were received. This article will describe the Python application developed for use in AWIPS during real-time operations and will briefly illustrate SRSOR sampling of the fire outbreak, particularly the Buffalo Fire in northwestern Oklahoma. This use of SRSOR demonstrates the applicability of research-to-operations for GOES-R era capabilities in future impact-based decision support services.
