Radioactive Wildfires: Wildfire Impact on Radiation Distribution

Team research project for NASA Space Apps Challenge 2017

Team: Triastsia materi

Project idea

Convenient information on the threat of the spread of radioactive particles due to fires in areas contaminated with radionuclides.

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Installation guide:

• Install Anaconda & Jupyter notebook
• Instal Gmaps https://github.com/pbugnion/gmaps
• Run notebook: wildfire-impact-on-radiation.ipynb

Proposed solutions:

• Available data that allow thread modeling:

  • soil contamination afrer Chornobyl incident (Ceasium-137)

  • wildfire data provided NASA (last 24h, 48h, 7days)

  • active fire data by NASA

  • weather data by NOAA

• model of wildfire movement (based on wind)

• model of wildfire creating dust (dust movement model)

• dust movement dependence on weather

• simplified description of algorythms:

  • detected fire spots + wind speed & direction in contaminated ared -> heat map of potentially dangerous zones (model)

• visualization solution for:

  • heat-map over Google Map API

  • heat-map of wildfire (last 24 hours)

  • heat-map of wildfire & smoke in danger area (last 24 hours)

  • heat-map of radiation distribution

  • heat-map of radiation + wildfire based on model model

Improvement notes:

• Model for forest fire & meadow fire are different!
• Model is dynamic and depends on time for: fire, wind, humidity, temperature, type of plants, etc.

Data & Useful information:

• Radiation data in Ukraine
• Fukushima 2011 vs Chornobyl 1986
• Online weather conditions
• Active fire data by NASA
• Weather data by NOAA
• Introduction to Fire Behavior Modeling
• Safecast in Japan

Issues to fix:

• Warning in Jupyter: The installed widget Javascript is the wrong version.
• Script to download latest wind flow data.
• Improve algorythms for spoting dengarous areas.