Greece is a high risk Mediterranean country with respect to wildfires. This risk has been increasing under the impact of climate change, and in summer 2007 approximately 200,000 ha of vegetated land were burnt. The SEVIRI sensor, on board the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) geostationary satellite, is the only spaceborne sensor providing five and 15-minute observations of Europe in 12 spectral...

Fire is a potentially powerful tool for achieving desired conditions of forest ecosystems. From an ecological perspective, the use of fire requires affirmative answers to either of the following questions: (1) Does it increase ecosystem health and sustainability? and (2) Does it preserve or restore unique species or habitats? Health and sustainability can be measured and defined in terms of: (1...

Smoke is a leading cause of death in fire. To minimize the potential harm from the smoke hazards in the course of a fire, a rational virtual reality (VR)-based fire training simulator taking full account of the various aspects of smoke hazards has been developed and is described herein. In this simulator, a visualization technique based on volume rendering and fire dynamics data has been especi...

Fire season precipitation trends were investigated using daily rainfall data obtained from seventy-six Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS) across Idaho and Montana for the period 1982 to 2006. Missing and erroneous values from each station were corrected with gridded data from the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), creating temporally consistent, comparable records. Monthly precipi...

In this paper, we use operational data collected for large wildland fires to estimate the parameters of economic production functions that relate the rate of fireline construction with the level of fire suppression inputs (handcrews, dozers, engines and helicopters). These parameter estimates are then used to evaluate whether the productivity of fire suppression inputs during extensive fire sup...

Not only the health service but also several other humanitarian institutions and societies were active in Abbazia÷Opatija, the most important town on the once Austrian Riviera, the town that was also known as the Austrian Nice. The most important of the societies was The Health Resort Opatija Volunteer Fire Brigade and Rescue Society. The authors of this article have been particularly intereste...

For the last century, fire management has focused on techniques to both protect human communities from catastrophic wildfire and to maintain fire-dependent ecological systems. However, despite a large and increasing allocation of resources and personnel to these goals, we are losing ground. It is clear that current fire management techniques are no match for the challenges requested of fire man...

The purpose of this chapter is to develop a resource management technique to utilize resource efficiently in multi-hop cellular networks. Multi-hop cellular networks have been proposed as a way to enhance throughput and extend coverage (Cho & Haas, 2004). This enhancement can in general be achieved by deploying relay stations in conventional cellular networks. The advantage of multi-hop network...