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I live in the Northwest US and the world around us is on fire right now. Frankly I'm scared to death so I've been really following what's going on at all the interagency sites and what not for the past month (we're supposed to get rain Saturday, fingers crossed). At the rate these fires are consuming land I could lose my entire place in 30 seconds flat but so far the nearest fire is very small, 8 miles away, and hasn't grown significantly in the last week. I have been unbelievably fortunate in that a) I got a light dousing of rain about a week ago, b) winds here have been nearly dead calm for two weeks, and c) the last few storms to pass through have been basically lightning free. One cigarette out the window of a car on the highway below though and it could all be over in an hour. That's some scary stuff if you dwell on it so this morning while it was cool I had a play.
First I put some MODIS hot spots in the sim so I could fly over the fires which was fine but it didn't really show the extent of the burn areas. Well you can download the burn perimeters as .kml and you can use gdal_rasterize to turn a .shp into a blend mask so all I needed was a way to turn the .kml into a .shp. There's probably a tool for that but I did it by gathering all the coords out of the .kml and pasting them into a .bln and then appending the .bln into an SBuilderX project. I just set all the polys to Hydro_whatever (so they'd compile) and the .shp I needed wound up in the Shapes folder.
I got a chunk of imagery with SBuilderX a little bigger than the imported .bln burn perimeter and let SBuilderX make an .inf. Then I got the coords from the accompanying .txt file and used them as extents in the gdal_rasterize command which means I ultimately ended up with a blend mask that matched the SBuilderX imagery perfectly with everything but the burn area blended out.
In Photoshop I desaturated the base imagery to sorta simulate burned timber, exported a .tif, and put it all together in the .inf. Well I think I need to work on making the burn area look more like burned timber but the basic process worked perfectly. I hope it doesn't make me morbid to be playing around with something people are losing their houses and even lives over, you really need to see the scope of this stuff though, and flying over it in the sim with the time/distance element gives you a lot better perspective than google earth. Just don't try to use real world weather or you won't be able to see a thing, lol.
Here's a shot over the extreme north end of the big North Star fire near Republic, WA. This is one of the biggest individual fires at 170,000 acres currently:
They just issued new Stage III evacuations an hour ago near Republic, Stage III means "get out now", a lot of these people are setting pets and animals free to fend for themselves because they can't go with them to the shelters that have been set up to receive evacuees. Everyday average people come out of the woodwork in droves though to help out, sending in hay and feed, offering safe pasture land and even transportation to get the animals out. The firefighters are glorified by the media and I don't mean to take anything away from them but it's really the average everyday folks coming out to help with whatever they can that are the heroes here. Some 15 year old girl and her mom standing in a sandwich assembly line making lunches all day for no reason other than because some poor displaced soul will eventually be hungry.
First I put some MODIS hot spots in the sim so I could fly over the fires which was fine but it didn't really show the extent of the burn areas. Well you can download the burn perimeters as .kml and you can use gdal_rasterize to turn a .shp into a blend mask so all I needed was a way to turn the .kml into a .shp. There's probably a tool for that but I did it by gathering all the coords out of the .kml and pasting them into a .bln and then appending the .bln into an SBuilderX project. I just set all the polys to Hydro_whatever (so they'd compile) and the .shp I needed wound up in the Shapes folder.
I got a chunk of imagery with SBuilderX a little bigger than the imported .bln burn perimeter and let SBuilderX make an .inf. Then I got the coords from the accompanying .txt file and used them as extents in the gdal_rasterize command which means I ultimately ended up with a blend mask that matched the SBuilderX imagery perfectly with everything but the burn area blended out.
In Photoshop I desaturated the base imagery to sorta simulate burned timber, exported a .tif, and put it all together in the .inf. Well I think I need to work on making the burn area look more like burned timber but the basic process worked perfectly. I hope it doesn't make me morbid to be playing around with something people are losing their houses and even lives over, you really need to see the scope of this stuff though, and flying over it in the sim with the time/distance element gives you a lot better perspective than google earth. Just don't try to use real world weather or you won't be able to see a thing, lol.
Here's a shot over the extreme north end of the big North Star fire near Republic, WA. This is one of the biggest individual fires at 170,000 acres currently:
They just issued new Stage III evacuations an hour ago near Republic, Stage III means "get out now", a lot of these people are setting pets and animals free to fend for themselves because they can't go with them to the shelters that have been set up to receive evacuees. Everyday average people come out of the woodwork in droves though to help out, sending in hay and feed, offering safe pasture land and even transportation to get the animals out. The firefighters are glorified by the media and I don't mean to take anything away from them but it's really the average everyday folks coming out to help with whatever they can that are the heroes here. Some 15 year old girl and her mom standing in a sandwich assembly line making lunches all day for no reason other than because some poor displaced soul will eventually be hungry.