Visualize active fires around the world with Javascript | Hacker News Reader

Visualize active fires around the world with Javascript

blog.znote.io

58 pointsalagrede16 comments

Data from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)

Wikipedia: a satellite-based sensor used for earth and climate measurements. They capture data in 36 spectral bands ranging in wavelength from 0.4 μm to 14.4 μm and at varying spatial resolutions (2 bands at 250 m, 5 bands at 500 m and 29 bands at 1 km). Together the instruments image the entire Earth every 1 to 2 days.

I looked this up because I want to know fires too close by. Updates every 1 to 2 days is not very useful for that.

In Portugal there is https://fogos.pt/ which is updated very frequently.

You can get (raw) data as the satellites (on precessing near earth polar otbits) pass over .. otherwise you wait until they next pass over, whether in the US or Portugal.

Processed data for the past 24 hours is available, it may be 18 hours "old" though.

See: (for regular processed products)

* https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/active_fire/

* https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/api/kml_fire_footprints...

And here for 'Ultra Real Time' over the US | Canada

* https://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/FIRMS/2022/07/14/

elsewhere you'd have to contact your local ground station and geolocate + bandprocess the raw data as it beams in if you want Ultra Real Time.

( Hexagon sell a product that can do this if you're not up to writing your own )

Very cool! Visualizations of data are very important for helping people understand what's significant.

Years ago I worked on a (now defunct) site for a local NPR station in SoCal that displayed information on fires going on in California, and I incorporated geometry from satellites (MODIS and I think something called VIIRS) to implement a fire spread animation. The user could press a play button and see how the fire spread over time.

In retrospect, that feature is kind of like watching car crashes on replay, but I was and am nevertheless proud to have worked on something like that.

The site is no longer working, but I saved a video of it:

https://youtu.be/HMzXNWiIC8k

EDIT: There were much more interesting spread animations than that but this video is all I have

Red on yellow with black borders is not a great choice of colors. Remember, your goal is to visualize.

Besides the article, znote is interesting. I was wondering why no JS notebook, similar to Jupyter notebooks exists.

That said, to build a JS data science ecosystem, znote would need to be open source. I assume that would hinder your monetization efforts.

Observable [0] seems to be inspired by Jupyter. I haven't had a chance to use it though. It looks like some of its core features are open source [1]

[0] https://observablehq.com/

[1] https://github.com/observablehq

I tried observable but a) I'd like to have the source files in git for version control + CI/CD. b) They use a special flavour of JS which I have no interest in learning.

The best solution I found was VSCode TS notebook https://github.com/DonJayamanne/typescript-notebook. However, ESM and notebook scoped package installations are not supported, along with some bugs.

What is really interesting is why are there fires during winter months in Southern Hemisphere and why are these fires predominately more denser in colder hemisphere than the hottest part of its northern hemisphere counterpart?

Not an expert but it could be that those regions have more extreme wet/dry cycles, whereas the hottest parts of North America are deserts without much vegetation.

Well in Australia for examples that's when fire control measures are done, during the wetter and cooler months there are controlled burns to reduce the amount of flammable material on the ground.

e.g. https://www.dfes.wa.gov.au/hazard-information/bushfire/plann...

Thanks for mentioning Javascript in the title. That's not very common in posts about Javascript, here.

This is really interesting, but where is the interactive version? All I see is code and static images.

The code is there for you to make interactive versions.

I thought this was visualizing people getting fired, oops.

I thought it was visualizing fires caused by JavaScript!

OT: do you have an opinion on these horizontal scrollbars? But it‘s not really a scrollbar, more like an indicator how far you have scrolled in the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com