‘Portugal Without Fires’, A Data Visualization System to Help Analyze Forest Fire Data in Portugal

The year 2017 was relatively tragic concerning the fires in Portugal. The scourge that settled in the country and the loss of countless human lives were engraved in the Portuguese memory. Due to extraordinary weather conditions and a lack of powerful means to immediately respond to the tragedy, more than a hundred citizens lost their lives in forest fires, some of them in severe conditions, in the middle of the forest and without a chance of escape, burned in cars as they fled. This paper presents the development of an integrated visualization system, exploring data acquired over the period of last ten years of Portuguese Forest Fires. The data was extracted from multiples of official public sources and formats, analyzed and classified accordingly. Advanced graphics and data-intense processing techniques provide distinct outputs, results, and correlations on acquired sources. This project contributes to innovative data analysis and reports perception, and it is intended to fit the expectation and needs of forest fires experts in crisis scenarios, representing an add-value for transformative co-decision.