Satellite Link International

How to use satellite data to track Las Conchas fire

The Las Conchas wildfire , a 92,735-acre blaze extending around the community and national laboratory of Los Alamos, N.M., often moves faster than the officials who monitor it. That can be frustrating for people who want to see where the fire is burning.

But NASA has an automated answer for the impatient: the MODIS satellite. It records fire data, and the U.S. Forest Service packages it up so Google Earth users can get a rough but useful view of the fire's behavior.

Here's how to take a look. But first, I'll share a sobering NASA photo taken from the International Space Station on Monday, the second day of the fire.

An International Space Station crew member took this photo of the Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos, N.M., on Monday, June 27, the fire's second day. The green mountains to the left (west) are the Jemez Mountains, a large volcano featuring a sunken ring-shaped caldera left from its last massive eruption 1.1 million years ago. The city of Los Alamos is just above the edge of the smoke where the green Jemez forests fade to a more arid brown. The Rio Grande flows from near the upper right corner to the lower left.

It's a daunting image for anyone like me who knows the area and the scale involved. There are 752 people fighting the fire right now, including four bulldozers, 28 fire engines, and five helicopters. Since the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, which burned hundreds of Los Alamos homes and thousands of acres of Los Alamos National Laboratory property, the lab has taken new fire counter measures including more forest clearing and automatic fire-suppression systems. So far today, physical risks to the lab are lower than earlier in the week, LANL Director Charlie McMillan said .

OK, so here's how to get the live fire data. First, you'll have to install Google Earth . If you're not familiar with this software, it's basically an interface to look at the planet through satellite photography. It's got lots of overlays, some such as 3D buildings and geographic place names from Google, and countless others added by third parties that have a desire to show geographic information.

One of these third parties is the fire data. It's stored in a file format called KMZ, which is a compressed version of the KML technology . (Historical aside: KML began its life as Keyhole Markup Language, and Keyhole was the company that developed Google Earth before Google acquired it and turned KML into an industry standard.

Expand Networks Provides A Clear Channel For Sheriff''s Department ...

The department has many challenges unique to the varied terrain.

Expand Networks, which optimized WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, today announced that Clear Creek County Colorado Sheriff’s Department, is benefitting from an innovative and unique communications system designed for operating in extremely challenging terrain and conditions. The system is comprised of cutting-edge communications technologies from Expand Networks and delivered by Clear Channel Satellite.

Combining Expand Networks’ Satellite optimization technology with Clear Channel’s popular XtremeSat™ Internet over satellite platform, the system allows for high speed broadband data and VoIP in a highly portable package.

Bob Exum , Sales Engineer for Clear Channel Satellite stated, “ The system Clear Channel Satellite has developed for the Clear Creek County Sheriff will assist deputies in responding to, and managing incidents throughout their county and, for the first time, it will allow for critical communications from difficult areas where it was never available before.”

Expand Networks’ data acceleration and link optimization solution is increasing data throughput up to 10 times. The Expand Accelerator, with integrated Space Communication Protocol Standard (SCPS) technology, mitigates the effect of low bandwidth and high latency obstacles that can traditionally impede the speed and performance of applications over satellite links. Combining SCPS with compression, byte-level caching and layer 7 QoS, Expand’s protocol agnostic approach accelerates all critical productivity tools and business applications across even the most extreme satellite environments.

According to Howard Teicher, Expand Networks Vice President for Satellite Markets, “the Clear Channel Satellite service unambiguously demonstrates the productivity and cost benefits of WAN Optimization technologies in wireless environments by increasing the virtual bandwidth of the network; increasing the value of network investment, lowering network operating and recurring costs while simultaneously enabling public safety, tele-health, distance learning, and economic development activity in rural areas.”

The system at Clear Creek also incorporated RAD Data Communications two-part solution with its patented VMux, TDMoIP Voice compression for up to 8 simultaneous phone calls and RAD’s Air Mux 400 for phone/data connectivity up to 10 miles away from the satellite uplink.