Planet Labs Hackathon: California Fire Map
Off the beaten path of the Lesbians Who Tech Summit, over at Planet Labs in San Francisco, fantastic mapping projects were built during the Space Technology: Data + Images Hackathon. Our group, consisting of Melanie Gin, Emma Grasmeder, Nicki Dlugash and Hilary Lee, Camilla Mahon and Heather Myers, got the idea of finding satellite data on northern California fires from a whiteboard brainstorm early on in the day.
Our project shows the before and after effects of the 2015 California Butte Fire, one of the most expensive wildfires to burn in California history. The before image was captured on August 23,2015 the after image was captured on September 9, 2015. Projects like this one begin to scratch the surface of what is possible in natural disaster analysis through satellite imagery.
For this project, we used satellite imagery of California that was collected by Blackbridge satellites and acquired from the Planet Labs API. We used Rasterio to alter the images (stripping out the alpha band) then we uploaded the images to a Mapbox account and added interactivity with Mapbox.js. We then spun up a Node/Express server and deployed our application to Heroku.
