Securely collect, process, publish and access a wide array of intelligence to visually enhance decision making processes related to forest fire management.
NT Concepts is providing Google Earth expertise to a USFS pilot project utilizing the Google Earth Enterprise (GEE) technology. The pilot was funded to evaluate the requirements, usability and cost of building a virtual globe solution to support the interagency fire and aviation management community.
The USFS uses GEE to organize their historical and current information to produce a common operational picture (COP) for the forest fire and aviation management community. The GEE system contains an extensive amount of imagery, terrain, and vector data at varying resolutions over key areas of interest. While imagery and terrain data makeup the "canvas" for the globe, the vector data portrays much of the dynamic information, such as historical fire perimeters, potential fire hazards, structure locations, current/forecasted weather observations, USFS assets, and other layers of interest. The enterprise system allows the USFS to control not only the security of the information, but also the look and feel for how the data is presented to the user.
The enterprise users of this system are the USFS and various other representatives from the National Interagency Fire Center, including the US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Bureau of Land Management, US Park Service, and others. NT Concepts coordinates the operations and maintenance of the pilot Google Earth system, e.g., requirements management, data management, system monitoring, and regular interaction with stakeholders.
In 2010, the project is funded to migrate into production status and will become a primary system for the fire and aviation management community.