About Us
The BRISK project is supported by grants from the NOAA OAR Weather Program Office (WPO) and NASA Wildland Fire Program. Our team is primarily based out of the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Team
Dr. Sam Batzli, Principal investigator
Sam is a geospatial data engineer with training in historical and cultural geography. At the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) he develops access to satellite and airborne earth observations of land, atmosphere, and ocean through GIS and internet mapping. He leads the development of RealEarth (https://ssec.wisc.edu/realearth) and related web apps and manages multiple grants related to mapping wildland fire burned areas. Prior employment includes the Dept. of Geography at Michigan State University, the Construction Engineering Research Lab of the Army Corps of Engineers and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Danielle Losos, Data engineer
Danielle develops cloud-native workflows to transition wildfire ecology science to analysis-ready tools. Danielle has a B.S. in Environmental Science from Yale College and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Previously, Danielle worked at the NOAA GOES-R Program and the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC), and brings years of experience with remotely sensed data, satellite operations, and cloud technology.
Other Team Members at UW-Madison SSEC: Dave Parker, Brian Lin, Caitlin Birdsong, William Straka.
Team Members at other institutions: Javier Villegas-Bravo (Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies), Roger Michaelides (Washington University in St. Louis).
Additional Background
Initial funding for wildland burn scar mapping came through the NOAA JPSS/RRPG Fire and Smoke Initiative. This supported the tests of BRIDGE maps using dNDVI from existing NASA and NOAA 8-day composites. Initial Google Earth Engine efforts produced an on-demand user driven mapping app in two different forms. However, as the algorithm became more complex and included sensor fusion, we migrated to an automated and more comprehensive daily product. Subsequent funding supported the development of dNBR mapping and an effort to tie support the near real-time distribution of incident-based fire detection and related satellite imagery products through the Next Generation Fire System (NGFS). Funding from the NOAA Weather Program Office (WPO) supported the refinement of our Google Earth Engine (GEE) processing and integration of GEE burn scar output with AWIPS (see example below) for Weather Forecast Offices, Regional Offices, and the Weather Prediction Center.
