Canary Islands don’t get burnt in their choice of software

OSOR reports that the Canary Islands are using open source software to forecast and manage forest fires.

Capaware is an open source 3D geographical multilayer framework which produces realistic images of land and enables virtual navigation to a given area. Based on the environmental conditions of the area (including, inter alia, humidity, vegetation and wind), Capaware “gives a real-time forecast which allows to know the evolution and intensity of a fire,” according to José Pablo Suárez, Professor at the Department of Cartography and Engineering Graphic Design of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Suárez explained that the data provided by Capaware is “very important” for forecasting of such incidents as they help manage and control the fire, especially in hot weather.

The program was developed by professors at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University and the Technological Institute of the Canary Islands, together with a local private company; it has been recently published in the international journal ‘Computers and Geosciences’.

In the Canary Islands, Capaware has already been installed at the Insular Operations Coordination Centre (Centro de Coordinación Operativa Insular – Cecopin) of Cabildo de La Palma, where operators make use of it to perform fire simulations and to manage the available human and material resources during a real incident.

Capaware is released under the GNU General Public License.

For more information read CENATIC’s original Spanish report.