Kontur’s Global Fires visualizes fires globally
and helps find smoke-free spots during wildfire season
In case of fire unfolding outside your window, it is vital to know where to find breathable areas nearby. When a threat develops rapidly information should be available at your fingertips. Therefore Kontur has been able to gather information about fires and air quality conditions into a tool available for mobile devices in real-time.
Why Kontur created Global Fires
The area affected by wildfires increases from year to year. The number of people, animals, and infrastructural objects that suffer from fires follows this trend.
Widespread burning during warmer and drier seasons is rapidly becoming the “new normal” across continents. The year-by-year analysis showcases that wildfires occur and evolve in a similar pattern. That makes it possible to predict how critical situations unfold and map out the action plans to fight the fires and avoid the consequences of this threat.
People are responsible for 75% of all wildfires in recent years. Vast territories in Africa from both sides of the equator get covered with fire every year due to slash-and-burn agriculture. Negligence and human-caused accidents are the main cause of fires in the Northern Hemisphere.
Fires take a heavy economic toll. Areas affected by wildfires in the U.S. drop in property values by 10-20%. Australia has lost an estimated $2.9 billion in tourism in consequence of the 2019-2020 fires.
Fire is not the only threat. It is always accompanied by air pollution. Wildfire smoke can stay in the atmosphere for weeks and even months. It puts huge populated areas at risk traveling up to thousands of kilometers. Every year air pollution from wildfires is estimated to cause more than 300,000 premature deaths across the world.
Wildfire season often occurs during hot summer and fall weather. It may pose health risks to remain indoors with windows and doors closed in homes without air conditioning during this time. It means people should seek protection via other means including finding places not polluted by wildfire smoke. To do so there should be a friendly and accessible tool to track the air quality and fire state in places nearby to take action.
What we built
Kontur’s Global Fires viewer lets you see a year of fires on your phone and find places nearby with clean air to escape during wildfires season.
We customized the Unfolded Map SDK to make a tool allowing to browse the data of fires for the past year and monitor the air quality state for the past three days on a mobile device. Kontur Event Feed is used to provide the event data.
Air quality is displayed using several categories from good (green) to hazardous (red) measuring the levels of PM2.5 particles in the atmosphere.
Contact us to get Kontur Event Feed with 20 years of fire data.
If you have questions about Global Fires, get in touch through our chatbox in the bottom right corner of this page.
Kontur offers specialized basemaps that do not interfere with the display of overlayed colored data.
You can get OpenStreetMap-based map styles made with MapCSS for your products.
Kontur offers advanced mapping and data services.
Whether you face logistic challenges having just addresses you have to put on a map or if you have the whole country insured and want to estimate potential risks in case of disaster, we can enrich your data using various Kontur Platform capabilities.
Estimating losses in the event of a disaster is difficult, and initial loss predictions rarely match the actual costs.
We created an algorithm to compute monetary loss based on statistical data using Kontur Platform capabilities.
Disaster Ninja lets emergency cartographers prepare mapping tasks in minutes instead of hours.
When a disaster strikes, humanitarian mapping teams face such challenges as choosing the area that needs to be mapped as quickly and accurately as possible. Our interactive dashboard helps save precious time by presenting the event’s details and all available datasets in a succinct, visual form.
Dispatcher 112 app helps dispatchers locate the closest fire stations and send the fire brigades faster to the emergency scene.
The laconic solution includes a typo-proof address search, custom routing algorithm for fire trucks, street length, and roof area measuring tools. The technology works well for the Minsk Fire Dept. and can improve disaster response worldwide.
Get information about changes in the course of events from reputable sources via a simple service and use that to make decisions about people, infrastructure and assets faster.
We are building the ultimate publicly available global population dataset by obtaining and processing all available data and fixing all known issues.
It was initially developed as a fundamental part of Disaster Ninja to help Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team take actions confidently based on data correlated with population density.
Kontur offers various tools to empower municipal authorities, urban planners, and businesses with geospatial analytics and situational intelligence for achieving smart city objectives.