Jump forward to 2018 and you have the Esri Fire Map a description of which is below:
"This Esri Storymap provides a quick snapshot of the raging fires across the United States and provides context to the severity of the California fires. The interactive map can be explored by panning and zooming. Click on a fire and information about that particular fire is displayed including the start date, containment and links to the latest news and social information.
About the tech and data: Esri Story Maps let you combine authoritative maps with text, images and multimedia content. It harnesses the power of maps and geography to tell a story in an easy and understandable format. The Story Map uses the ArcGIS Javascript API and is linked to interactive timelines and magnitude displays. The cartography uses AGOL Firefly symbology — radial gradients — and a dark basemap.
The fires and perimeters are a service of the GeoMAC community that uses the Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination, an Internet-based mapping application that is designed for fire managers to access online maps of current fire locations and perimeters in the United States. Members include the USGS, National Interagency Fire Center, National Weather Service, Remote Sensing Application Center, Bureau of Land Management and the National Geophysical Data Center. The data is updated manually based on information from a host of sources including those on the ground. Typically the data is fresh to about 24 hours, but there is variability since it is a carefully curated process. https://www.geomac.gov/about.shtml
Links to external fire-specific information feeds (keyword-driven URLs) from Google News and Twitter activity are also included."
This is the power of technology for good!
Bob Ruschman shared the information and links above.
