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San Jose State to link fuel-moisture portal to FEMs API; current dataset lacks post-outage samples
Summary
Researchers said the Fuel Moisture Repository currently contains data scraped from the National Fuel Moisture Database only up to an early-March outage and that they have recently gained access to the FEMs field-sample API. The team expects to integrate FEMs data in the coming weeks and said the portal is configured to perform weekly automated scrapes by default.
San Jose State University researchers and agency partners discussed near-term plans to connect the Fuel Moisture Repository (FMR) to the FEMs field-sample API so the portal can ingest newly collected fuel samples. Presenters said the repository currently contains data scraped from the National Fuel Moisture Database only up to the national portal’s outage earlier this year and does not yet include 2024 samples.
Angel, a postdoctoral research associate with the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center Fire Modeling Group, told the call the repository was created because the national web interface became unusable. The team said they have begun meetings with developers, including Scott Lynn, and are working on a back-end process that will pull data from the FEMs API into the repository.
Jack Drucker, the portal’s original developer, said he had recently gained access to the FEMs API and was still analyzing available endpoints. “I typically just got a hold of the API maybe a day and a half ago,” Drucker said. He said his plan is to write backend code that will use the API to populate the project’s SQLite database and then display the new data through the existing web interface.
On timing, Drucker said he hoped integration could occur within a few weeks. He described the repository’s automated update cadence during prior scraping as weekly and said the team can increase that frequency if users prefer. “We would update it every week,” Drucker said, adding that the team could switch to more frequent scrapes if operational users request it.
A FEMs representative said FEMs plans to develop many of the same visualizations in time, and that the two efforts may temporarily duplicate functionality. The FEMs representative said FEMs aims to provide a central service but acknowledged that San Jose State’s portal already serves nonfederal users and offers an alternate access path while FEMs capabilities mature.
Attendees pressed on operational details. Kevin Osborne, who identified himself as working in predictive services in Northern California, emphasized that field teams sometimes have low bandwidth and said that lighter-weight GIS tools and a continuous, consistently formatted dataset are useful for deployment to incident support teams. Others asked whether 2024 graphical data would be available for the coming fire season; Drucker said the team intends to have 2024 data displayed as soon as integration is complete.
The presenters said programmatic endpoints and a public back end (hosted in a GitHub repository) exist so agencies can pull data for Excel and other analysis tools. Drucker confirmed that downloads by station ID, state and time frame are possible and that the repository’s CSV export works for offline analysis.
No formal governance, hosting-cost agreement or schedule for daily updates was announced on the call. The presenters invited feedback on update cadence and feature priorities and asked interested users to share enhancement requests.
