Adelaide-based Airborne Research Australia is creating free 3D high resolution maps of devastation caused by fires in the Adelaide Hills and Kangaroo Island to help communities recover and reduce future fire risks.
The maps, which contain unprecedented detail and are available from the Airborne Research Australia (ARA) website, are intended to assist communities, emergency services agencies and researchers to plan recovery from SA’s summer infernos, to better understand fire behavior and develop future fire defense strategies.
ARA collects data for these high-resolution maps from low, slow flights by crewed motorgliders equipped with LIDAR, hyperspectral sensors and high-resolution RGB cameras.
It renders this mapping data in three dimensions (3D) and animates it as flythroughs to simplify viewing.
ARA founder and Chief Scientist, Flinders Emeritus Professor Jorg Hacker, says this high-resolution mapping data would help plan for community recovery and future fire prevention.
“In many cases, remote sensing data taken from fire-affected areas disappears into a black hole, so the general public either never sees it or sees only a down-sampled low-resolution version,” he says.
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