From Response to Prevention
Staying a Step Ahead of Disasters with Powerful Image Analysis
Stay Ready and Aware
Natural hazards, like fires and floods, are a fact of life. Swift response and proactive planning can mitigate the severity of a disaster and lessen the potential for cascading impacts.
Emergency response planners need to be able to quickly identify areas of high risk and vulnerability and prioritize resources for maximum impact. That’s where innovative technology like Esri’s ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online can help. Analysts can see the bigger picture, with the context of location, to make more informed decisions.
The Grizzly Creek Fire
This need for a bigger-picture view was readily apparent in early August 2020, when a wildfire grew in Colorado’s Glenwood Canyon. The Grizzly Creek Fire would ultimately burn more than 32,000 acres over five months, leading to evacuations and a 13-day closure of a major interstate highway across Colorado.
A Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) team was assigned to the Grizzly Creek Fire. Such teams measure the fire’s impact on the landscape to identify areas in need of emergency and long-term stabilization. This process relies on powerful analysis to mitigate ongoing impacts from the fire, such as debris loading, flash flood risks, and restoration efforts. Understanding a fire’s long-term potential for catastrophic damage requires postevent imagery and change-detection analysis to see how the fire alters the landscape.
Powerful Analysis within Reach
Whether working as an individual or on a team like BAER, imagery can be used to better identify future risk following events. Resources available from ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online in the cloud include imagery, data, and apps from authoritative global organizations and other users that share their work. Because it's part of the ArcGIS system, users have access to tools and solutions that support every step of their disaster management efforts, from field teams management and data collection to analysis and decision-making.
Simplify Integration
ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online provides the option to either host one’s own data or access open-source data. This example illustrates analysis using open-source satellite imagery of the affected area from the day before the Grizzly Creek Fire began, made available for anyone to use at scihub.copernicus.eu.
ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online simplifies access to imagery without the complication and cost of managing in-house infrastructure. By hosting one’s imagery in ArcGIS Online, a user can quickly search, access, and share data as it is needed and at scale. Users can get more value from their imagery by combining data to add context, creating interactive apps and dashboards, and extracting insights.
Accelerate Understanding and Action
Teams of any size can easily perform change detection, assess impact, and gain situational awareness before and after an event using pre-trained models and tools, without the need to code. And, when analysis results are in the cloud, collaboration with other teams and decision-makers can be simplified to better support the organization’s bigger picture.
The example on the left used raster functions in ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online to quickly apply various color composites (natural color, and color infrared), and another that looks at the difference in vegetation in both pre and postfire images, analyzing the imagery color ratios; also known as a band ratio. All with only the click of a button. Adding the burn boundary of the fire helps visualize the before-and-after comparison for further analysis.
ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online users can run in-depth analysis on the fly, including color infrared and colormap rendering to aid in the study of burn severity and the impact on vegetation.
ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online also gives users the ability to render layers swiftly and at lower cost, and combine them with other types of data including terrain and precipitation history. This provides a diverse, comprehensive understanding of the impacts, helping to develop immediate action plans and longer-term recovery strategies.
On the left is a web map created using ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online following a methodology similar to the official analysis performed by US Geological Survey (USGS) for the Grizzly Creek Fire. The web map utilizes a model to create a risk assessment of runoff hazards, integrating predicted rainfall, terrain ruggedness, and burn-severity layers. All of the data used for this analysis was freely available through open data sources, including the USGS elevation , ESA Copernicus Open Access Hub , and DAYMET .
Taking Action Today for Tomorrow's Crises
Based on the post-fire analysis, the BAER team recommended the construction of berms along specific areas of I-70 to protect infrastructure from future events like mud slides during heavy rains.
The berms turned out to be essential a year later, when monsoonal rains exacerbated by climate change, triggered flash floods in the Glenwood Canyon area. These flash floods led to debris flows in the areas destabilized by the wildfire’s lingering burn scars. The berms saved the state hundreds of millions of dollars in damage .
Had the BAER team not acted on its analysis by recommending the highway berms, I-70 could have been closed indefinitely by the torrential debris.
The Time Is Now
Natural hazards such as weather extremes, wildfires, and flash floods occur outside our control; however, tools exist to help us remain resilient while planning for and mitigating the impacts of these events when they come our way. When facing challenges like the example above, ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online can help gather intelligence for disaster response and mitigation, integrate workflows in an interconnected system, and improve resiliency to build a better future.
Learn more about ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online and see how you can unlock the potential of your imagery.
