Tactical
Agency
Automation
FireBridge serves as the mission-critical bridge between federal satellite telemetry and local public safety endpoints. We provide county emergency managers, state forestry agencies, and utility providers with a fully automated response pipeline that eliminates the reconnaissance gap. By fusing three independent satellite systems with dual-source weather intelligence and USGS terrain data, our platform generates CAP-compliant evacuation zones in under sixty seconds — replacing manual uncertainty with validated modeling before the first smoke report is verbalized.
Federal Integration Partners
NASA FIRMS • NOAA GOES-R • NIFC WFIGS • USGS 3DEP • US Census Bureau • Open-Meteo • OpenStreetMap
DATA SOURCES & PIPELINE
Technical Infrastructure
01 / DETECTION
Three-Satellite Fusion Engine
NASA FIRMS VIIRS (Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20), NOAA GOES geostationary, and NASA LANCE are polled simultaneously and continuously. Each source operates on independent infrastructure — different satellites, different processing chains, different ground systems. Detections are clustered by proximity and time window, then scored by corroboration: a hotspot confirmed by three or more independent systems is flagged Confirmed. Two sources: Probable. One source: Unconfirmed. A gas flare or industrial heat source rarely triggers three independent satellite pipelines simultaneously — so false positives are suppressed before they ever reach a responder.
02 / ANALYSIS
NOAA NWS live observations and the Open-Meteo global weather archive are queried simultaneously for every fire location. For fires detected within the last two hours, NOAA live station data is used directly — with automatic fallback to the NOAA hourly forecast grid if a station reports calm conditions. For fires detected more than two hours prior, NOAA current readings are discarded entirely. FireBridge queries the Open-Meteo historical archive (hourly data back to 2012, global coverage, no API key required) and selects peak wind conditions from the fire's active afternoon burn window. A fire flagged by satellite at 3 AM gets the 35 mph winds it actually burned under — not the overnight calm. Wind speed, direction, temperature, and humidity feed directly into the Rothermel spread engine.
Dual-Source Weather Fusion
03 / MODELING
Terrain-Aware Rothermel Spread Modeling
USGS 3D Elevation Program data at 10-meter resolution feeds a physics-based Rothermel fire spread engine for every analysis. Slope and aspect multipliers are calculated at the fire location — uphill fire spreads 2 to 8 times faster than flat terrain, and the model adjusts automatically. The result is a wind-adjusted spread cone that points downwind, scales with terrain, and generates projected fire positions at 1, 2, and 4 hours. NIFC WFIGS incident data is cross-referenced to match satellite hotspots against official named incidents — separating active wildfires from controlled burns and industrial signatures.
04 / IMPACT
Population and Structure Assessment
The projected spread zone is overlaid against US Census Bureau American Community Survey data and OpenStreetMap building footprints in real time. Every analysis returns an estimated resident count and a structure count — residential and commercial buildings inside the evacuation perimeter. Jurisdiction is automatically resolved via the Census TIGER reverse-geocoding API, returning the county name and FIPS code so responders and alert payloads know exactly who owns the response before anyone picks up a phone.
05 / DEPLOYMENT
CAP Payload and Incident Brief
Two export paths are generated from every analysis. The CAP-compliant alert payload packages event type, threat level, wind conditions, spread projections, population and structure impact, jurisdiction, and evacuation zone geometry as GeoJSON — formatted for direct injection into any mass notification platform including Everbridge, CivicReady, and IPAWS-compatible systems. The Incident Brief generates a print-ready summary in one click — threat level, spread timeline, weather conditions, terrain multipliers, impact estimates, and jurisdiction — designed to be handed to a briefing room or attached to an email in seconds.