Abstract

Using Big Data to Learn About Wildfires
Track: Fire, Rescue, and EMS
Authors: Ben Butler

For the past two fire seasons Wildland Fire Management RD&A staff have been mining tweets about wildfires with the goal of developing an early warning system for new and emerging wildfires. TwitterFire relies on a custom built search algorithm to examine an average of 5,250,00 tweets and narrow the data set down to only the Tweets that are likely about wildfire. Tweets are mapped and used to drive a notification system which sends emails or texts to users when a threshold is met for a location.