Case Study
Sawday Fire, 25 October 2019
At 9.19am that morning it burst into flames and, fanned by strong winds, went on to destroy 97 acres in the surrounding area.
The moment of impact
Eyes in the sky fire on the ground
The computer detected the fire in the GOES 17 satellite feed in the 16:26:27 frame. At this stage, the human eye is not capable of recognising the fire in the image against the background. However, Fireball’s methods and algorithms identified the fire with a high probability.
The ground-based system detected the fire three minutes later on the Woodson East Camera at 09:22:20. The Mesa Grande South camera shows smoke at 09:21:38, but the smoke is staying very close to the ground (due to the wind).
The Volcan Mountain West Camera 09:28:47 has a small amount of smoke just poking over the hill.
The system detected the smoke at 09:30:47.