Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness

In disaster response and military operations, critical tasks include the collection of information about a situation, operational planning, and execution. Situations rapidly evolve, and awareness is informed by a wide variety of data sources such as weather conditions and forecasts, damage assessments, response team locations, and resource availability. Current and complete knowledge of a given situation enables the protection and rescue of life and property, while minimizing safety risks for the response teams.

This situational map provides a clear understanding of the situation on the ground for the Dixie Fire in August of 2021. Firefighters can quickly assess where the fire is, the location of critical infrastructure, and what areas have communication coverage. (DARPA Phase II SBIR “Phoenix”)

Funded by the USDA, GDA is developing a platform that improves situational awareness in wildfires through distributed multi-modal data analysis, assimilation of local sensor data with regional models, and fusion of dynamic and static data sources. By integrating historical data, weather information, ground assessments of fuel, fire spread models, on-site sensor data, topography, and more, the SMoLDER platform will provide a comprehensive basis for response planning and decision making. These tools will readily adapt to other natural disaster response scenarios such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and other severe storms.