Calculate the population of an area affected by active wildfires

methodology.md

Create estimate of population affected by active fires

The goal is to estimate the amount of people affected by active fires in a given area, using VIIRS satellite data and US Census data

1. Cluster fire data points from VIIRS data into groups, representing active fire areas
   • NASA VIIRS Active Fire Data
   • scikit-learn KMeans Clustering
2. For each group, create a polygon that contains all points (a convex hull), this represents the boundaries of a given fire area
   • Geopandas GeoSeries.convex_hull
3. For each polygon, create an intersection against Census tract boundaries.
   • Spokane County Census Data
   • Lincoln County Census Data
   • Whitman County Census Data
   • Stevens County Census Data
   • Ferry County Census Data
   • Pend Oreille County Census Data
   • Adams County Census Data
   • Shapely object.intersection
4. Calculate the populations of the tracts that are fully contained
   • ?
5. Calculate the populations of tracts that are partially contained, based on the percentage of overlap
   • ?
6. Profit?