What the system does not do
samoEKO is a situation map and an early-detection aid, not a real-time alarm system. These limits are measurable, and they are stated here because a user has to know them before trusting the map.
- 1Six observation windows a day
- Overpasses fall between 23:00 and 02:00 and between 10:00 and 13:00 UTC. Between 15:00 and 01:00 local time there is effectively no observation, precisely the afternoon peak of fire ignition.
- 2Around three hours of latency
- Outside North America detections become available roughly three hours after the overpass. Combined with the observation gap, a delay of more than twelve hours is possible in the worst case.
- 3Cloud cover blinds the sensor
- Thermal detection does not penetrate cloud. An empty result is never an all-clear. The map therefore distinguishes visibly between „nothing detected“ and „not observed“.
- 4Lower limit of detection
- A pixel measures 375 metres. At night flames of about two square metres are detected, during the day about forty. Small fires that are extinguished quickly are systematically missing.
- 5Permanent industrial heat sources
- Steelworks, power stations and cement plants produce the same thermal signature every day. samoEKO retrieves the known sites through a separate FIRMS query and marks such points instead of showing them as a major fire. That query requires a NASA access key; whether it is running is stated below.
- State: the mask is NOT running. The NASA access key it requires (FIRMS_MAP_KEY) is not configured, the query fails on every run, and not a single detection is marked as a permanent heat source. Until then power stations and steelworks appear as ordinary detections. The failure is also listed in the retrieval log of the operations centre.
These limits are not an argument against the situational picture, they define how it is to be used: samoEKO shows where to look first. Only reconnaissance on the ground can declare a sector clear.