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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | NOVEMBER 2020 29 THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT! By Steve Benoff Here are two apps I hope never to use again, but I'm afraid I will have to. The rash of fires California and the whole west coast have been experiencing has devastated much of our forest and consumed thousands of homes. We have been affected locally by these conflagrations. Soon after the Apple Fire was brought under control the El Dorado fire spread across Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Beyond the devastation these fires themselves have caused is the unprecedented air pollution experienced by millions of residents many miles away from the fires. I use two smartphone apps to follow both the fires and the air pollution. Cal Fire has what they call a web-based app, but they don't have one for your phone. I use one called Fires – Wildfire Maps and Info. The main screen of the Fires app shows eight fire resources you can select from for fire information including four from Australia, which may be a clue to this app's origin. The four pertaining to the U.S. are InciWeb – Incident Information System, Cal Fire, NIFC – National Interagency Fire Center, and USDA Forest Service – Active Fire Mapping Service. All four of these resources follow the same paradigm. They present a map showing active and recent fires. For California fires, Cal Fire is the place to go. You are presented with a map of California with red and gray flame icons. Use your fingers to move and enlarge the map. When you get enough separation between incidents, you can see that the red flames vary in size according to the acreage involved. If you press on a flame, a box pops up showing the name, location, acreage, and percentage contained for that incident. Also in the box is a circle with an "i" inside. If you press it, you'll see a much larger box with more detailed information such as when the fire started and when the information presented was last updated, exact location, fire agencies involved, cause, and public information phone numbers. The gray flames show past fires with the same info. These fires can be as far as three months in the past. InciWeb provides what appears to be excellent West Coast fire coverage. It included the three local active fires (Snow, Apple, El Dorado) as well as dozens of active fires west of Denver. The NIFC map shows fires throughout the country. As of the time I'm writing this column, the NIFC map plotted 1000 active fires, but the information didn't seem up to date. For example, while it included about 20 fires in Alaska and a dozen in Florida, locally it included only the Apple fire. So, while InciWeb and NIFC will give you quick overviews, if you want current information on California fires, Cal Fire is the place to go. There are other mapping resources in the Fires app. One shows you historical fires throughout the country. Others show weather maps. By the way, the Fires app will occasionally have a pop-up ad which you can X out of after a few seconds. That's a small price to pay for the material presented. As for air pollution, my preferred app is AirVisual. The key piece of data is the AQI for selected locales. As the app's website says, the Air Quality Index considers up to six main air pollutants and calculates their respective health risk for each at any given time and combines these calculations to give a single AQI with a range from 0 to 500, a number unfortunately approached by Portland, Oregon during the worst of the Oregon fires this summer. The app is color coded with green for 1-50, yellow for 51-100, orange for 151-200, and purple for 201 and above. Air Visual is a very well-designed app with an enormous amount of data presented in various ways. If you press the list icon, you'll see a listing of 95 cities worldwide with their AQI numbers. If you press the earth icon, you will see color-coded circles with AQI numbers for cities throughout the world. It's worth the download for this map alone. But the screen I use the most is the heart icon. It shows the AQI for cities I've selected and placed in my desired order. Each location shows the current AQI as well as the AQI category for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Tap any location and you'll see the category for three- hour time-frames several days out as well as a seven-day forecast. During this fire season, I've found the current-days forecasts to be quite good based on my own unscientific observations. However, I'm not so sanguine about future forecasts. I've stopped relying on them; instead, I wait until the morning to see what the day holds in store with respect to air pollution. Incidentally, one of the changes in Apple iOS 14 (one I failed to mention) is the inclusion of the AQI (usually lagging by two hours) for each location you have in your Apple Weather app. If you use an app you'd like to share with others, let me know at steve.benoff@verizon.net. Tracking Fires With Technology

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