BAER Down Under

When the Australia wildfires were burning in February, the US Gov't sent over some BAER teams to assist in their emergency assessment. The BAER teams almost rely on our remote sensing support now, so they called us. Turns out my DOI counterpart did all the mapping for this round since I did the Greek fires during 2007.

Well, the Aussies saw the work the BAER teams were doing and were really interested in the remote sensing data. They indicated there were a bit interested in learning how they could receive this kind of support for future fire years. That sounded fun, but nothing much came out of it at the moment due to all that was going on.

I was talking to my DOI counterpart about this last week and told him we really need to pursue this. After that conversation, I spoke with my boss about the idea and he was totally for it. He said, "Well, this kind of thing (international support) looks good for RSAC, and we've got ample funding for you to go, so I think it's a great idea."

He left my cubicle and I immediately re-engaged the conversation with my DOI counterpart and said, "Okay, we're going in September. Get an official request from someone in the Australian gov't justifying our trip."

Now, before you say, "Great, another government boondoggle," let me say that this really would be a very useful trip for the Aussies. We could go over there and give them training in two basic phases:

1. How to track the fires and satellite imagery overpasses, ordering imagery, processing the imagery to top-of-atmosphere reflectance, and creating the dNBR and subsequently the BARC layer;
2. Once they have a BARC layer, we would then teach them what to do with it -- how to manipulate it, make edits, customize it to their ground observations, etc.

Then, instead of us being asked to support them in future years, they could handle it themselves. It's the whole, "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man how to fish, he eats for a lifetime" principle.

We've got no official word as of today, but I'm more likely than not going to go to Australia this fall. We'll wait until September or so in an attempt for our fires here to calm down and before Australia's summer begins in earnest. Here's to crossing my fingers.

I'm off to Denver next week for a BAER meeting. I'm an invited speaker at their annual BAER refresher. Fun stuff. For real.