Update
MOSSEL BAY NEWS - Speculation on the cause of Monday's fire is rife, with several possibilities being mooted.
At this stage there is no conclusive proof for any of the reasons being suggested.
The head of Mossel Bay's Fire and Disaster Management Services, Joseph Johnston said at best the results of research into the cause will only be available in about a month's time.
"A request was made to the South African National Space Agency (SANAS) for assistance," Johnston said.
AFIS System
Their Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS) monitors all active fires on a daily basis. Information or point data obtained from the AFIS was used in the geographic information system (GIS) to keep track of dates and time of fires.
The GIS is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyse, manage, and present spatial or geographic data.
The AFIS system is based on MODIS data. MODIS is an instrument operating on both the Terra and Aqua spacecraft. AFIS also obtains information from the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite, a geo-stationary metrological satellite that provides weather information over Africa and Europe. The image acquisition frequency of MSG is every 15 minutes, which makes it ideal to track fires, even though it has a low spatial resolution of three kilometres.
Detects flames of active fires
The AFIS system detects the active flames of a fire, using bands from the mid-infrared range (Frost 2012). The spatial resolution of the mid-infrared bands and the thermal infrared bands, which are used in the AFIS system, is approximately one kilometre.
The smallest flaming unit or single fire that can be detected is 50m x 50m (Frost, 2012). In case of the MSG, the smallest single fire unit is 500m x 500m.
Johnston says the research will be able to pinpoint the origin of the fire. He cautions against speculation until sufficient proof of the cause can be determined. The results of the research, he says, will be shared with insurance companies.
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