CAIIMT 15 posted a great map this morning of the tactical history of the Smith River Complex area. It is an example of how far we’ve come in saving and using mapping from past fires (something that has always been harder to do than it might seem).
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That’s an awesome map. The current revisions of symbology concocted by NIFC are working well. Many other aspects of Incident GISS seem to be suffering from Fed top-down, heavy handedness, but that’s just my personal opinion. I cut my teeth on FIMT Tools so I’m a dinosaur. Jim Kniss is still around, but I haven’t seen him for a while.
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What’s going on with NIROPS? We’ve only had 2 or 3 good perimeters for the NW California fires in past 7 days, and I’m getting calls from folks from fires outside California who are also getting UTF Mechanical on their flights. Is the program all contract planes now, or is NIROPS still operating their own 2 planes?
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Does anyone have an archive of the NIFC FTP site pre 2014 or so?
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That would be great. I wouldn’t mind having maps for a number of historic fires to use while teaching.
@pyrogeography Zeke, you should see a historic folder in each North and South folder. I don’t remember if it holds every incident. Looking for something specific? DM me if needed.
A lot of data got lost when they migrated the old server to a new one in Kansas City. I’m looking for someone who has an actual backup of the site on a hard drive from before the migration.
I’ll take a look "around ". So you’re looking for everything?
I’ve got a lot of the post-2014 stuff for Northern and Southern California, but yes, it would be great to get ahold of everything pre-2014 for California.
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I highly recommend paying Cal Topo for a pro subscription to their web-based mapping platform. You also get extra features in their Mobile App.
Here is an example of the settings I am using to see 6 hour-old Sentinel Satellite imagery, with current NIFC perimeters and structures.
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There are a huge number of resources on the Timber and Plaskett Fires and no FOBS in the IAP. Is this common these days? It took the IMT almost 5 days to fill orders for DIVS for the back side of the Timber. Are FOBS in short supply as well, or UTF? Or are teams just using them less?
Timber wasn’t able to get an IR flight this week and sent crews into the field with a perimeter that was 36 hours old. We can’t get so reliant on the intel ships that we forget how to update maps with field observations…
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weird that they got a UTF for any sort of IR observations we have other tools than fixed wing aviation but you know that lol. Not sure on the FOBS these days I have been out of the SITL world for 6 years now so i cant speak with any sort of accuracy. But the cal-topo stuff is good but you know im more of a TAK man myself …
I know of at least one FOBS trainee assigned but last I heard from him they had him doing other things.
IR was posted UTF again this morning for the Plaskett and nothing posted for Timber.
I heard UNMANNED ROMEO was over the Plaskett last night. Is that not an IR mapper or am I just confused?
The unmanned Romeo’s are the UAS modules. They can do IR but are limited to their battery span. They are using them for firing operations.
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Unmanned can grab a branch overnight but a fire this size man you gots have a multiple modules doing IR missions with these quad copters. On the NIROPS side or whatever they call it now they do have sat available. Cal Fire Air Intel has been doing some daytime missions and pushing to arcgis online as Im pulling those into TAK Server just fine but that is not coming with your traditional IR products its a perimeter map only.
This group is pretty rad and I just built in a connector to the Map Depot ATAK plugin update I hope to get released today with a video to show how it all works. But this is all like DJI M300 size quad copters. USFS/CAL Fire equivalent would be the ALTA-X the same one they are firing with. Just with a camera on it which they do have.
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Sweet! Thanks for the info!
Very helpful, thanks!