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HPWREN Cameras Capture Time-Lapse Animations of San Diego Wildfires - Network-connected cameras operating as part of the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) project (http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/) have captured dramatic time-lapse sequences of the spread of San Diego County wildfires. HPWREN is a joint effort of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (both organized research units of the University of California, San Diego). The project has created a non-commercial prototype of a high-performance, wide-area wireless network that spans much of San Diego county. This NSF-funded network includes backbone nodes on the UC San Diego campus and a number of "hard to reach" areas in San Diego county, including several mountain peaks with hundreds of square miles of line-of-sight coverage. The HPWREN data communications infrastructure not only is used for network analysis research, but also provides high-speed Internet access to field researchers from several disciplines (geophysics, astronomy, ecology), educational opportunities for rural Native American learning centers and schools, and emergency data communications for local government agencies. The high-speed radio network -- 45 million data bits per second -- enables field researchers, data collection stations, and emergency workers in mountain and desert locations to efficiently transmit large amounts of data in real time. The network relay stations are themselves instrumented with environmental sensors, enabling the HPWREN researchers to determine what local conditions affect the throughput of data over the wireless network. The environmental sensors include high-resolution cameras; their images can be transferred over the network without interfering with other traffic due to the network's high speed. Animations of the recent wildfires in San Diego County were compiled by Hans-Werner Braun, Principal Investigator of the HPWREN project. The animations are MPEG2 video, no audio, in a DVD-compatible format. The Mt. Woodson animations are from 704x480 pixel interlaced images taken by a remotely controllable (pan/tilt/zoom) digital video camera. The frame rate is approximately one image every ten seconds. The two animations are from the first night and following day of the Cedar fire, October 25 and 26, 2003. Some of the daytime imagery is of the Paradise fire. The Mt. Laguna animation is down-sampled from more than 3000 progressive-scan images at 1288x968 pixel resolution, taken by a remotely controllable digital still camera near San Diego State University's Mt. Laguna Observatory. The frame rate is approximately one image every ten seconds. The animation is from October 28, 2003, and shows the plume building up over the Cuyamacas and heading towards Mt. Laguna. Please note: These are fairly large files, all more than 80 MB in size. We strongly recommend that you download an animation in its entirety and then play it from the local file, rather than try to play the animation directly from the Web. Mt. Woodson -- October 25, 2003 (82.9 MB) http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/Cedar/2-MtWoodson-1.m2v (83 MB) Mt. Woodson -- October 26, 2003 (80.5 MB) http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/Cedar/3-MtWoodson-2.m2v Mt. Laguna -- October 28, 2003 (84.4 MB) http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/Cedar/4-MtLaguna.m2v In addition, Braun has posted still images of California Department of Forestry firefighters at work near Ramona on October 26. A set of clickable thumbnail images is available at http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/Photos/20031026/; the full-sized images that these link to are 1792x1200 pixels in size. Here is one image, scaled down to fit within a single screen window.