Kind: captions
Language: en
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finding fires are a crucial asset for
anyone curious in observing the world
from afar whether you're a journalist
investigator or researcher finding fires
from space can be such an important part
to starting off an investigation they're
really interesting for the fact that
fires are important to monitor for
natural reasons for natural causes
but even more important to monitor when
they're caused by people
in most cases i find a lot of my work
observing fires or heat signatures in
and around conflicts where fire might be
used as a weapon of war
while looking at satellite images of
fires might seem okay
each of those data points represents
what is likely a horrific
story
impacting human life and involving
potential human rights abuses
so let's get looking at how we can start
to identify fires easily from space
and verify information that we come
across using simple data verification
techniques
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hi everyone and welcome back to this
series on how to do open source
investigations from home
i'm ben and this is part 14 so let's get
started
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we're going to start this tutorial off
with a practical example from a case in
myanmar
we were told that this was potentially
filmed in the north of myanmar maybe
around the mandalay region
and around mid-january so around the
13th the 14th of january but we have no
real clue as to exactly where this
occurred we were told that there was
some fires potentially lit by the
myanmar government or the myanmar
military we can see a number of smoke
plumes or smoke stacks rising up here
maybe here
a few more possibly in the background as
well and what we're looking at is a
video recorded from the other side of
the river when we go through those
simple verification techniques we're
looking to answer those questions of
where and when something was filmed and
then perhaps start to answer the
question of what was actually happening
so we could maybe go to google earth
we could have a look at the mandalay
region
and start perhaps trying to geolocate
this footage
and see on what river it was filmed but
there's a lot of rivers in myanmar a lot
of big ones as well
so this is probably going to be quite
difficult to geolocate and take quite
some time but remember what we're
looking at is quite large fires or
potentially quite large fires or smoke
plumes anyway
so where can we go if we want to see
fires from outer space well there's a
really handy website from nasa and it's
called firms
firm stands for the fire information
resource management system and what it
does is it shows near real-time fire
data from nasa satellite observation
projects and these are heat signatures
picked up from the earth's surface
what's really useful about this is that
we can also go back in time on firms as
well there's a link in the description
below to firms but you can also just get
there by typing in nasa firms and having
a look at their world map
the link in the description below will
take you through
both the location of the video we've
used in this case study as well as the
direct location of where that fire
actually happened so you can follow
along step by step with this tutorial so
let's maybe have a look and see
our rumored area was the mandalay region
of myanmar and we were looking around
june 14 and june 13.
so i'm going to start with june 14.
i've also selected jude 13 down the
bottom here this is really useful this
slider because you can select
large windows of time
two weeks one month or you can select
two days or even one day as well
now you can already see that there's
quite a few fires that have been active
in some of these areas that's not all
that's not to say that all of these
fires are lit by people are deliberately
caused obviously this would pick up a
lot of natural fires as well and forest
fires myanmar has quite dense
green areas so obviously that would be
ripe for natural fires as well
but what we're looking for is around the
mandalay region and remember we were
also looking along a river right
and i think what we're probably also
looking for is multiple fires not just
one because you can see there's one here
there's a smoke stack
barely visible over here so there might
be a fire there as well burning at the
same time
so we can scroll around and you can
start to see some of these blocks
we've got single blocks over here
we've got ones over here and we've also
got a small collection over here it's
also next to a river as well which is
quite handy for us because if you
remember our video
we would look overlooking a river
where on the other side of the bank was
the village or town that was allegedly
on fire what we can do is zoom in a
little bit more and
just to maybe correct and check false
positives let's have a look at perhaps
two days before were there fires okay no
were there fires afterwards
on the 15th or 16th no
let's maybe go down to one day and go
backwards on the 14th
no no fires on the 13th hey yes
we've got our fires so this is really
interesting
and what this does
is it gives us a location as well
so now we can perhaps go through some of
the tricks that we learnt in previous
videos on geolocation right
matching up
the clues that we see in this footage
like the landmarks the river the trees
perhaps some of the buildings if we can
make them out in a distance like this
little thing over here with the rooftop
the bank
the shrub on the bank
perhaps if there's curvature on the bank
this line of trees after an empty patch
of sand
and things like that
and see if that might match up with that
location
so we could have a look at this location
we can see that it's
on one of the rivers here we've also got
the latitude and longitude up here as
well so
what we knew what we know is that this
is at
latitude 22.36
longitude 96.06
so we could simply
type that in
what this is doing is it's taking me to
that latitude and longitude
and okay we're now viewing the same
place that we were viewing over here
but remember with google earth we've got
a lot more details and we can also zoom
in quite closely
sometimes google earth might have
updated imagery so we could zoom in just
a little bit closer here
click back on one of the dates and see
that actually
this was uh taken in
on the 27th of february 2022 this
satellite image so that's quite useful
because
the satellite the the verification that
we've just done here has shown that this
is in january 13
so we've already got a more recent
satellite image that may even show some
of the burnt buildings but let's just
quickly verify if that's the exact
location so
in the video if we remember
we're looking at this kind of green area
and we've got a sand bank with a small
green hedge
possible building
and a gap in the hedge
i go over here because i see this stand
bank out standing out quite large in
this area we're looking over the river
we seem to have a gap in a hedge like
what we have there
and we seem to have a building right
there
so i think this might fit the location
and perhaps our person was even filming
from across that sandbank
in this empty little gap over here
we could probably go through and match
up some of the other features
but what i also want to look at is if
there were any buildings that were
actually look like they might have been
destroyed
what we can do is just have a quick look
on google earth and see if there's
perhaps some buildings around here that
aren't there anymore
yeah
it looks like we've got some buildings
that are missing
that might have been cleared so we've
got a couple of buildings here
we've got maybe some buildings over here
as well
so that's just a simple way that we can
use firms to help us geolocating footage
so we can also do that the other way
around now what do i mean by that
well you saw on firms that there's a lot
of different fires
that appear to be happening in different
areas
so what if we were to go to somewhere
like
ukraine
and let's perhaps have a look at a place
called madiupo mariupol has been one of
the hardest hit areas and has been well
documented but there also appears to be
a number of fires showing up on the nasa
firm site and we can see these burning
throughout the countryside
with a lot happening in mariupol's
residential area
this is a
view
of march 22 23 and 24
of the
nasa firm's data that we can see
if i click on some of these options for
more intricate heat signatures from v i
i r s
we can see a lot more popping up
so how could we maybe verify to see what
these fires look like where might
exactly have they been coming from
well if we remember back to previous
tutorials we've got a lot of free
satellite imagery available on our hands
it's not just all on google earth
we could have a look at google earth but
it might not have that regular coverage
so what we could do is use something
like sentinel hub
i'll link to one of the tutorials i've
done before on sentinel hub so you know
how to use it
but basically we could go to the same
view around the same date on sentinel
hub
so here's an image that we have on march
24th we have a few other images
available to us
march 19 march 29 march 14th
i've chosen much 24 because it's in my
window of time that we have showing
these fires around mario
i'm having a look in the western side
because there seems to be quite a
concentrated block of heat signatures
coming out of the western area just west
of the azov style factory
if we have a look at this area
it's quite dark on our screen but we can
actually see
what appears to be some smoke clouds
i can click on my color infrared
vegetation
and we can see those a little bit more
clearly they appear to be coming from
these residential apartment blocks and
that's just a quick way that we can
verify some of these heat signatures to
say
with certainty
using multiple sources that yes there
are fires coming from buildings in
madupo and that we know when and where
they're happening and specifically
what's happening
some of these buildings are on fires now
we could cross references on google maps
to find out what buildings these are
what they're being used as if there are
still people there we could have a look
at footage on the ground to see that
type of destruction
what we can also do and i've covered
this in one of the previous tutorials
is just to identify exactly where those
files were coming from because you see
in the natural color satellite image
we can't really see exactly where those
files are coming from it's quite a dark
image
if we
open up
our sentinel hub eo browser but
specifically what we can look for is
wildfires
wildfires is actually supposed to be
used or normally used as a tool for
detecting forest fires or things like
that
but what we can actually do is use it
to detect some of that burning in
madupol
so i'm going to go over here
and i'm going to look for a satellite
image
or the previous satellite image that we
were looking for from mario paul
from
march
24.
so i brought that one up
the handy thing and this is why i
selected the wildfires function is that
we can click on this last tab wildfires
and
now you can see
something a little bit more visible and
a little bit more clear so get rid of
those labels off there
and now we can actually see what that
looks like
in comparison to what our previous one
looked like
so we've got these red squares which are
showing the heat signatures but this one
actually allows us to see
the areas of burning now this doesn't
show the exact fires but what it does is
it picks out specific colors
or
specific data points out of the
satellite imagery and just gives them a
bit of a touch up and a bit of a
highlight so we can see them a little
bit more clearly
and you can see that
quite a large portion of the city or or
quite a quite a number of spots in the
city there are small orange areas where
there may be fires and we can even see
the smoke trails
coming out of some of those as well
so we can just for that day alone
verify exactly where all of those small
fires were burning which there seemed to
be a number concentrated around this
area
in
central marijuana some of them around
here
but also some of them around the
outskirts here
of where there may be residential areas
or homes uh that are on fire
and we can zoom out and see those uh
quite a lot a lot more broadly as well
for example we can zoom out and discover
fires up here
this appears to be a grass fire maybe of
natural courses may not be
but as you can see a very useful tool
for detecting where there are fires from
outer space
and and using those multiple tools
together creatively
allows us to draw out quite original
information and answer those fundamental
questions that we're always looking for
of where when and what was happening and
then perhaps start to lead to using
footage from the ground who might be
responsible
i hope you enjoyed this short session on
how to identify fires from space and and
how to use that to help you answer those
questions of where when and what
and i look forward to seeing you in
future episodes
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you