Building FAIR and Open Data Access Services for Next Generation Fire Detections at NOAA/NESDIS

Rising temperatures, declining snowpack and frequent droughts are all leading to a dramatic surge in wildfire frequency and severity. Recent wildfires totaling over 4,300 active fires in Canada are just one testimony to the changing climate and wildfire risk across the planet. Increasingly, wildland fire events are impairing water supplies, disrupting economies, threatening lives and property, and altering the landscape for generations.

As the nation’s leading environmental science agency, NOAA provides critical outlooks, forecasts and early warning products, monitoring temperature, precipitation and soil moisture across the nation.

In response to this growing threat, as well as increasing data volumes and diversity of data sources, NOAA/NESDIS is collaborating with the University of Wisconsin Space Science and Engineering Center’s (SSEC) Next Generation Fire System (NGFS) to build a responsive, performant web portal providing critical access to many data that are relevant to diverse user communities like scientific researchers, emergency responders, educators, citizen scientists, and the general public.

Using scalable, distributed, cloud-based technologies NOAA/NESDIS is embracing FAIR and DEIA data principles to build a fire detection and data access system. By leveraging the newest generation of API specifications from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as well as distributed, cloud-optimized data formats such as Zarr and Cloud Optimized Geotiff (COG), we are building reusable data access services to empower NOAA’s web-based user interface as well as GIS clients and user developed software. These services also provide exciting opportunities for data interoperability use cases, such as correlating fire detections with data about local populations or known fuel types at the location of a fire.

In this talk, we will discuss the growing needs of the wildland fire communities and present progress towards a fully operational next generation fire detection and data access system, enabling future scientific endeavors and ultimately improving NOAA’s ability to protect lives and property.