Jharia coalfield · Jharkhand, India
Underground coal fires crack and sink the land that people live, work and drive on. Fire Watch follows every one of them from space, and closes a road before a fire reaches it.
A fire you can't see is still a fire. Every 8 days a Landsat satellite crosses Jharia. Every fire gets followed, and every road above one gets a decision, with a person in charge whenever it matters.
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Step 1 of 8
Every 8 days Landsat 8 or 9 passes over Jharia. Fire Watch reads only the coalfield window of each scene: the heat band, six colour bands and the cloud mask, about 10 to 13 MB a pass.
Output A fresh heat image and colour photo
Band 10 is turned into land-surface temperature: radiance, then brightness temperature, then a correction for how much heat the surface gives off, estimated from its vegetation. Cloud, shadow and water are masked so they can't fake a fire.
Output Surface temperature, within 0.10 K on test data
Each pass is aligned to a reference so the same patch of ground is compared every time. SIFT aligns it, ALIKED with LightGlue on OpenCV 5's new DNN engine aligns it again on its own, and DISK settles any disagreement around a hotspot.
Output Passes aligned to within half a pixel
Dark coal and bare dumps warm up in the sun, so that heat is regressed out against brightness and vegetation. What's left is compared with the local background, and hysteresis and contours outline each hotspot. Coke ovens and other industrial heat are recognised and ignored.
Output Hotspots, with precision 1.00 on both test worlds
Hotspots are joined into tracks from pass to pass. Optical flow measures how the hot front moved since the last pass, and an advection–diffusion ensemble projects where the fire could reach in the next 48 days.
Output A spread cone covering 92% of the ground a fire went on to burn
Every hotspot gets a risk score from its heat, its spread and how close it is to a road, plus a score for how sure the system is. Similar past fires, found with OpenCV's nearest-neighbour index, show how fires like this one behaved.
Output High, medium or low risk, and how sure it is
The agent closes a road within 250 m of a fire on its own only when risk is high and it is at least 70% sure. Fires half under cloud, threats seen only in the projection and anything it can't confirm go to a person with a recommendation. After two quiet passes it proposes reopening, and only a person can reopen a road.
Output Matched a safety officer's call in 35 of 36 test situations
Closures and decisions appear on the dashboard and the public road-status list, with every step the agent took and why. Alerts go out through AWS, and every map layer carries a record of where it came from.
Output Safer roads over a burning coalfield. Read the full explanation
Fire Watch checks every Landsat photo of the coalfield, follows each fire from pass to pass and keeps the roads above them safe.
Drag the line to compare the ordinary photo with the heat image from the same satellite pass. Each ring is a fire Fire Watch is following.
No satellite photo has been processed yet, so there is nothing to compare.
Type a town, mine or road to find the nearest fire and whether a road there is closed.
Move the sliders to change an underground fire, and watch the agent's decision change in the 3D coalfield. It uses the same scores and safety rules as the real system. Bring a hot fire within 250 m of the road and see what happens to the people and trucks on it when the road stays open, and when it closes.
From a satellite pass to a closed road, and back. An animated walk-through of what Fire Watch does on every photo.
Pick the one that fits. Only the dashboard needs a sign-in.
See which roads are closed right now because a fire is too close.
No sign-in neededReview each fire, approve or refuse road closures, and reopen roads once a fire goes quiet.
Opens the dashboard, sign-in requiredA five-minute guided tour of the key moments in the season, with what to click.
Guided tourFrom satellite photo to road decision in four steps, in plain words.
Help guideSetting it up on your own computer? See running it with real data. Something not working? See troubleshooting.
Roads closed because an underground fire is close to them. A closed road reopens only after a person checks it.
Jharia's fires burn in coal seams below the surface. You can't see the flames, but the ground above them gets hot, cracks and sinks.
Fire area mapped from satellite heat images by the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC)
The mapped area has shrunk as burning coal is dug out, covered or flooded. What is left still lies close to roads, railways and homes.
Source: NRSC figures in BCCL's Jharia fire report.
