In the midst of a difficult fire season in many parts of the world, the United Nations’ (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization has launched a new online fire detection system that will help firefighters and natural hazards managers improve response time and resource management. The Global Fire Information Management System (GFIMS) delivers fire data from an imaging sensor aboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites to generate daily fire maps and images through a freely accessible Web interface. The system also dispatches detailed email alerts of the quantity and coordinates of fires, and it does so less than three hours after a satellite passes over burning land. Read More
