A groundbreaking study from Tel Aviv University led by Colin Price and PhD student Hofit Shachaf has provided new solutions for containing forest fires and natural disasters.
It's a simple but revolutionary tool: smartphones. The TAU team discovered that mobile devices could be a crucial source of data for predicting these phenomena, because they already have built-in sensors that can record temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, magnetic fields, light, sound and acceleration, among others.
Although these measurements are often ignored, their analysis could allow for early warnings in regions where weather stations are scarce. For the study, scientists used a series of data collected through the WeatherSignal app to develop an index based on vapor pressure deficit, a parameter that measures the dryness of vegetation and, therefore, the risk of forest fires.
Shachaf explained that “under warm and dry atmospheric conditions, vegetation loses more moisture, facilitating the ignition of fires. Our study leverages smartphone data to calculate the VPD with high temporal and spatial resolution.”
They then compared this data with data collected during the fires in Israel in 2016 and Portugal in 2013, and the results showed VPD anomalies detected via smartphones before and during the events.