Aethon

Inspiration

Wildfires move faster than most people can understand from a map. We wanted to make fire behavior tangible: click a location, see the terrain, and explore how wind, moisture, and fuel affect possible spread.

What it does

Aethon is an interactive wildfire-simulation experience. Users select a point on a 3D Cesium globe and receive a visual fire-spread forecast based on landscape fuel, terrain, weather inputs, and the Rothermel fire-spread model.

How we built it

We built the interface with Cesium and a custom web frontend. A Jac backend runs the Rothermel propagation workflow and returns fire-arrival data to the globe. The app combines global land-cover data, OpenStreetMap roads and structures, elevation, and weather when available, then renders the resulting fire perimeter directly on the terrain.

Challenges we ran into

The hard part was connecting a scientific simulation to a fast, interactive globe while keeping the data pipeline reliable. Public geospatial providers can rate-limit or fail, so we added caching, reduced request volume, restored the OSM proxy, and made provider fallbacks explicit rather than hiding them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a complete click-to-simulation experience with a real Jac-powered backend instead of a visual mockup. Aethon can run the same workflow across locations in the United States and internationally, while showing the result spatially on a 3D globe.

What we learned

We learned how to translate Rothermel-model inputs into a practical interactive product, connect Jac services to a browser application, and design around the reality that live environmental data is incomplete and sometimes unavailable.

What's next for Aethon

Next, we want to improve data-source resilience, validate outputs against historical incidents, add time controls and scenario comparison, and build tools for emergency planners and communities to explore fire risk responsibly.

Built With

• cesiumjs
• esa-worldcover
• geospatial-data
• jac
• javascript
• landfire
• node.js
• open-meteo
• openstreetmap
• overpass-api
• rothermel-model
• vite