Landgate is the statutory authority responsible for Western Australia’s land and property information. It manages the State’s land titles system and provides geospatial information services to the industry, government and the general public. Landgate does much more than this bland description suggests, and gives the impression of being a very service-oriented organisation with a very broad view of what service to the community means.
The Firewatch site clearly works on top of the GIS and datasets available on the Sentinel Hotspots website run by Geoscience Australia, but is easier to use and seems to allow much quicker access to the area one wants to monitor, with quicker reloads.
From the point of view of coordinating Smokespotter observations Firewatch has one significant advantage - the page shows the Latitude and Longitude of the cursor position. Now if it only allowed plotting of bearings from a given point it would be a very nice Smokespotting tool. Sentinel can not only do this (giving the bearing, distance and Lat/Long of start and finish points), but also keeps a series of bearing lines on the page until they are cleared. If only we could have a combined Sentinel, Firewatch, and (a working) Current Bushfire Incidents website it would be a fantastic tool.
There may also be other functions useful to Smokespotters available through a free subscription to the Firewatch site which I will explore in the coming weeks. There's also a "beta" version of the site where new development is being tested.
Here's a screenshot of part of a Firewatch screen to give you an idea of the detail and the range of tools available (unlike Sentinel, the purpose of each tool is shown when the cursor hovers over the tool). Click on the map to open an enlarged view - the yellow stars in the top right are the satellite records of the fire over toward Esk that was generating so much smoke on the weekend.
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