Sensor Web 2.0 has been selected by the independent judging panel and editors of R&D Magazine as one of the 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace over the past year. Sensor Web 2.0 is a web services-based software architecture enabling a network of heterogeneous sensors (both space- and ground-based) to operate as a cohesive whole for a variety of science goals, including wildfire management in California.  Co-Investigator Robert Sohlberg of the University of Maryland Department of Geography, Principal Investigator Dan Mandel, Pat Cappelaere, and Stuart Frye of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Vince Ambrosia and Don Sullivan of NASA Ames Research Center developed the product in 2007 as part of a wildfire management initiative.

Sensor Web 2.0 has been demonstrated with sensors and imaging instruments on space-based satellites, ground-based sensors, and unmanned aerial system (UAS)-based sensors. It also has been used to simplify the data-assimilation process and make it more robust. One large effort that will reap the benefit of this technology is the Global Earth Observing System of
Systems (GEOSS) – a worldwide initiative to form a network of Earth-observing systems and registered sensors that image and detect data ranging from population and vegetation density to tsunamis and major natural disasters, painting a complete, real-time picture of the Earth via shared global resources.

The main application that has been demonstrated and is currently making robust use of Sensor
Web 2.0 is wildfire detection, mapping, and characterization. From August to October 2007, the Sensor Web 2.0 team from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and University of Maryland worked alongside researchers with the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), NASA Ames and the Forest Service to conduct five missions demonstrating how the Sensor Web 2.0 architecture can be used to detect, map, and help mitigate damage from wildfires in southern California. In this real-time demonstration with real consequences and lives at stake, Sensor Web 2.0 first gathered data from MODIS, the space-based satellite used to detect wildfires in the southern California area being observed. The back-end architecture was then able to automatically task NASA’s EO-1 satellite to scan the wildfire area. Using the telescopes and cameras on its sensor, EO-1 was able to further refine the location of the fires. While EO-1’s 30-meter range is close enough to refine the location (whereas satellite instruments like MODIS detect 1km hotspots from space), fire managers benefit from even more detailed information due to the rapidly spreading nature of wildfires. The architecture was used to task the NASA Ikhana UAS in flight to get even more detailed information about the fires. In an additional experiment, the UAS observations were used to target a subsequent acquisition by the EO-1 satelite.  Various data sets gathered at different times were integrated providing investigators with a more detailed situtational awareness of how the fire progressed. Thermal-infrared imagery was automatically sent back to scientists and displayed via standard Web services using the Google Earth map service (see image).

This screen capture shows the rapid visualization of combined data from multiple sensors between August 27 and 30, 2007.

Everett Hinkley, Liaison and Special Projects Program Leader for the USDA Forest Service remarked that, "The sensor web concept is a remarkable way to share complex geospatial data from a network of sensors linked by software and the Internet to a wide audience in a user-friendly fashion. This ‘system of systems’ supports the need to access satellite and airborne imagery for post-disaster management (floods, wildfires, hurricanes, volcanoes, etc.). The Forest Service has already tapped into this system during the southern California wildfires in October 2007, and we will continue to expand our use of this utility in the future."

The system is currently operating to image early summer fires occurring in northern and southern California during 2008.

Funding for the Sensor Web 2.0 project was provided by the NASA Earth Science Technology Office’s Advanced Information Systems Technology program.  Funding for cooperators conducting the UAS activities was provided by the NASA Applications program, with MODIS fire detections funded by the NASA Earth Observing System.