Forest Fires And Global Warming

Climate change is a serious problem facing humanity and it will affect various aspects, from massive-scale agriculture to wild forests. Forest fires is a challenging problem affecting large parts of the globe. The damage that forest fires may cause is tremendous not only with regard to human life or the money spent and efforts, but also the degradation of vast green areas that in the end causes desertification. Along with global warming, it is expected that more forest fires will be erupted in the near future. This problem will lead to a chain reaction as forest fires lead to desertification, and hence, desertification may lead to global warming, which in turn leads to further forest fires in the future. Forest fires may be caused by nature

Many other countries in the world have forestry industries way more than Portugal, for example, Finland, Canada and the United States of America. In addition to life losses, forest fires may cause tremendous direct and indirect losses. While the direct losses are those that those that the governmental and non-governmental organisations usually report, for example, losses due to the private and public property damage, value of the burned trees and the budgets dedicated to fight the fires. The indirect losses at many time are huge and cannot be estimated accurately, for

When it comes to fire, every second counts and the longer the time taken to detect the fire, the larger it will spread and the harder to control. The sensor network should be distributed in the forest that needs protection. A fire alarm will be sent to the command and control station if the temperature measured by some sensor is above a certain threshold. Several factors need to be considered in the design and analysis of the big data coming from the sensors, for example, the season and the current weather temperature, and the algorithm should be carefully designed if the sensor is positioned at direct sunlight thus causing more heat. The sensor network will provide big data that need to be analysed and thus detect any raise in the temperature. Each sensor is georeferenced in order to know exactly where fire eruption may occur. The acquired big data will be analysed online to provide prediction and detection of forest fires. Furthermore, the history of the data along with the erupted fires will be used, in the future, to build an intelligent system to predict naturally erupted fires that are due to summer heatwaves (e.g., via reinforced