Wildfire Map

Fires that NASA satellites spotted over the past day. Each dot is a MODIS thermal anomaly; colour and size follow the fire radiative power.

Refreshed hourly

— hotspots in 24 h every detection with confidence of 30 % or more

— high-confidence confidence 80 % and above

— night detections the satellite passed over the fire at night

Power (FRP): under 20 MW 20–50 MW 50–100 MW 100 MW and more

How satellites see fires and what the dots mean

The dots are not "fires" in the everyday sense but thermal anomalies picked up by the MODIS spectroradiometers on the Terra and Aqua satellites (and, in newer products, VIIRS on Suomi NPP and NOAA-20). The instrument compares the brightness of every roughly one-kilometre pixel in the mid-infrared band (around 4 µm) with its neighbours: a burning patch radiates orders of magnitude more in this window than cool ground, so even a modest fire "shines through" a kilometre-wide pixel. A dot therefore marks a 1 × 1 km cell in which something is burning — not the outline of the flames.

Fire radiative power (FRP, in megawatts) is how much heat the hotspot radiates towards the satellite — in effect, how intensely it burns: tens of megawatts for a grass fire, hundreds or thousands for a large forest fire. Confidence (0–100 %) is the algorithm's estimate that the anomaly is genuinely thermal rather than sun glint on water, a cloud edge or a hot roof. Keep in mind that a hotspot is not always a wildfire: stubble burning on farmland, gas flares at oil fields (the Persian Gulf is a classic example), steel furnaces and glowing lava at volcanoes produce identical anomalies and land in the same product. A cluster of high-FRP dots in forest or steppe is almost certainly a fire; a single persistent dot over an industrial site is most likely a flare.

The data comes from NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System), the MODIS Collection 6.1 "Global 24h" product. The satellites pass over any given spot a few times a day, so the snapshot covers the last 24 hours rather than "right now": a fire may have died down after the overpass or may not have been imaged yet. We download the fresh file once an hour and replace the previous snapshot completely, dropping detections with confidence below 30 %. For the strongest hotspots we look up the nearest city within 150 km in an offline GeoNames gazetteer — that is a landmark, not a claim that the city is burning.

Data: NASA FIRMS (MODIS C6.1, Global 24h). NASA does not endorse or verify third-party services.

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