Time to resolve: 1 hour 10 minutes
Hello again, reader! As you can see, this challenge took me a little more time than my previous post. I don’t love these kinds of challenges where I can’t use the usual store sign, statue, or balcony to geolocate the challenge, but I’ve gotten better at them.
Let’s see what today’s challenge brings!
Exercise #012
Tasks:
The screenshot below shows satellite imagery from a coastal area. Each red pixel represents a 30 metre centre point containing a thermal anomaly. The data is from January.
Please analyse the screenshot and answer the following questions:
a) Which website was used to produce the image below?
b) Which is the country seen in the image?
c) The screenshot shows data from a specific date. Which is the date?
We are told the image shows satellite imagery from a coastal area, and the red pixels are related to thermal anomalies. I used this information to search for “website containing satellite imagery for thermal anomalies.”
After opening that first link for the NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), we immediately get a match.
I thought finding the location would be harder than finding the date, so I used “Inspect Element” on this challenge webpage to test my luck.
As you can see above, the screenshot was taken in August 2023. This could have been renamed, but we will use this information as if it was true for now. This tells me that the thermal anomaly captured in this challenge must have occurred prior to that date.
At this point, I realized that without a location, the date is not very useful… so I tried a reverse image search to see if there was an article that used a similar picture of the event.
All the results were hard to differentiate at first, but something that stood out to me was that one of them was from the Itata fires in 2023, and the other, with a very similar picture, was from Chile.
I went to the FIRMS website, navigated to Chile, and started scrolling from the bottom up at the same distance from the view in our challenge until I got a match.
We found our location, but we don’t see the same amount of thermal anomalies observed in our challenge after setting the time to January 2023.
I tried searching for other fires in Itata but could not find anything for that. I opened Google Earth and saw that Santa Julia was close to our target location, so I used this to search for other fire incidents.
Searching this way got me a result from February 1, 2017, covering the evacuation of 800 families due to the strong winds that continued to stoke the fires in Chile.
I adjusted the timeframe to January 1, 2017, for 31 days in the FIRMS website, and surprisingly, this did not have much red in it. I moved my date closer to February until I got a big bunch of red displayed and thought maybe 30 days was too much, so I adjusted it down to 1 day since it was a pretty big fire and got my match.
Above are my results with a perfect match on January 26, 2017.
This concludes the challenge. We learned about a web-based platform that provides near real-time data on active fires and thermal anomalies detected by satellites. This platform aggregates data from various satellite sources and presents it in a user-friendly manner, making it easier for researchers and emergency responders to analyze fire trends and patterns.
I hope you enjoyed reading the blog. If you did, feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments section below and check out my other write-ups. Stay tuned for more!
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