Last Update: 20 June 2006

Announcements

14th December 2005

Sentinel finds a permanent home with Geoscience Australia

The Sentinel bushfire monitoring system is now hosted by Geoscience Australia after nearly three years as an R&D demonstrator project, providing a very valuable service to the fire management community. The Sentinel bushfire monitoring service is an internet based mapping tool designed to provide timely information on the location of bushfires to emergency service managers throughout Australia.

The system was jointly developed by the CSIRO Land and Water, Geoscience Australia and Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO) following the severe bushfire season of 2001-02. CSIRO was operating the web site as an R&D demonstrator project with hotspot data provided by Geoscience Australia's remote sensing data acquisition facilities in Alice Springs.

Early in 2005, Geoscience Australia decided to host the operational Sentinel system as a logical extension to its current remote sensing activities. Both CSIRO and Geoscience Australia Sentinel services will run in parallel until January 2006.

Sentinel hotspots are derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor on board the Terra (morning pass) and Aqua (afternoon pass) satellites. Between these two satellites, each with a ground swath of 2330 km and day/night coverage, images are captured over a given point at least four times a day. MODIS acquires data in 36 spectral bands of which primarily two thermal infrared channels at 4 and 11 µm are used for hotspot detection.

Geoscience Australia's Sentinel system offers the following improvements over the previous system.

• Reduced turn around time in updating hotspot information on the web.
• Improved website performance.
• Improved quality of MODIS colour imagery (500m), which is updated within two hours of acquisition. Clients can compare location of hotspots with the actual MODIS imagery in the background.
• Choice of access between dial-up and broadband internet connection.
• MODIS data acquired from the Hobart ground station is now integrated into the web service. This extends Sentinel hotspot coverage to New Zealand and also serves as a backup for SE Australia (in addition to Alice Springs coverage).
• Find/search facility - users can find bushfire locations using place name or other attributes. Users can also locate bushfires within a given buffer zone.
• Supports additional topographic data (250K maps).
• Supports OGC web mapping services (WFS and WMS).

Geoscience Australia will progressively add more satellite data and hotspots from other satellites (eg. AVHRR). Please note that both CSIRO and Geoscience Australia Sentinel web services will run in parallel at least until January 2006. Once the operational capability of the system is established, CSIRO will withdraw their Sentinel web service.

For further information, please contact Geoscience Australia's Media Hotline 1800 882 035