Pastoralists flock to bushfire website
New South Wales pastoralists are being encouraged to log onto a website that uses satellite technology to quickly find fires on remote parts of their property.
The 'Sentinel' website is run by Geoscience Australia, and measures areas of land that are much hotter than the land around them.
Dr Adam Lewis runs the Earth Observation Area with Geoscience Australia, and he says Sentinel is particularly useful for places like the far west.
"In urban areas and places where there are more people, fires tend to get noticed more quickly," he said.
"In remote areas, it's often the case that the satellites will see the fires first.
"There have been cases even north-east of Broken Hill, where a fire has been detected, in November 2012 I think it was, by someone in Sydney watching the website, who then contacted the local areas to see if they knew that they had a fire on their station."
Last week, the Rural Fire Service fought 37 fires across far west New South Wales.
Dr Lewis says the past week has seen a massive spike in traffic to the site, as people check out bushfires around their area.
He says the website has not been this popular since the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, in 2009.
"In the last week, 6-13 Jan, we had 4,458,000 hits on the website, and that's way up," he said.
"In December we had nearly 3-million hits in the entire month of December.
"But during these big events, as fires get more active, we see more people."
The website can be found here: http://sentinel.ga.gov.au/acres/sentinel/index.shtml