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Willem Marais is the recipient of a 2009 Outstanding Contribution by an Individual Award from the CSIR Meraka Institute. He leaves in July to pursue a Master's in signal processing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
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The highly successful Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS) - a CSIR
success story which draws on expertise from the CSIR Meraka Institute
and support from the CSIR Satellite Applications Centre with funding
from Eskom - will benefit countries in east and central Africa. Willem
Marais of the CSIR Meraka Institute was responsible for the installation
of an AFIS processing system at the Malindi ground receiving station of
the Italian Space Agency (which is part of the European Space Agency) in
Kenya.
What is AFIS?
AFIS uses satellite data combined with mobile phone technology to
provide crucial early warnings to local disaster managers, fire
fighters, farmers and forest managers who need information on where a
fire is, and where it's heading. To date, Eskom, Working on Fire, the
National Disaster Management Centre and the Department of Agriculture,
Forestry and Fisheries use AFIS on a daily basis in South Africa.
AFIS relies on Earth observation satellites from NASA and Europe to detect possible hotspots on the ground. A sophisticated processing system developed in-house ingests raw satellite observations and within minutes of the satellite overpass produces the location of fires across southern Africa. Fires a small as 50 m² can be detected by the satellites, based on the radiance emitted by the fire.
AFIS in Africa
Marais's visit to Kenya followed the donation by the CSIR Meraka
Institute of a processing server to Malindi. To date, the satellite data
from NASA has been available to Malindi via a 6 m MODIS receiving
antenna, but has been unprocessed.
Malindi is situated 3° south of the equator and 357.71 km from Nairobi.
Once Marais arrived with the equipment, his first challenge was extreme
heat. "It took some getting used to," he says. He stayed in onsite
accommodation which helped him to maximise his short visit.
"Installing and configuring the server with the help of my counterpart, Boniface Oyengo, went well," he recounts. "It was important to ensure that the Malindi and CSIR systems are compatible." The systems are automatic, requiring only minimal intervention from Oyengo.
Now fire data received at Malindi are archived and fed back to the main AFIS server in South Africa, making this a repository of fire information from southern, eastern and central Africa. "We have fire data all the way from Sudan on the AFIS system," Marais explains. "This is almost two-thirds of Africa!"
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