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wildfiredata.dev
Free, versioned files of satellite fire detections for the US and Canada, matched to official US fire incidents and perimeters, with NOAA's daily smoke plumes.
What it is
wildfiredata.dev brings together three public sources on wildfires. NASA’s FIRMS service publishes the spots where satellites detect heat from fire. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) publishes the official US fire incidents and their mapped perimeters. NOAA’s Hazard Mapping System publishes smoke plumes drawn by analysts. The site joins them into plain files and a simple API, with no key or account.
It belongs to a family of data sites that share one design: one schema per dataset, versioned URLs, and a stated license and credit line for every source. Like this site, it’s run by Eric Ness. Treat it as you would any other secondary copy: useful for getting started, not the place to make a decision about a fire.
What it measures
It has four datasets:
- Active fires (
active-fires): satellite fire detections from the last 7 days over the US and Canada, from the VIIRS instrument on three satellites (S-NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21). The site groups detections into fire events: detections in the same or neighbouring 1 km grid cells within 48 hours of each other count as one event. Each event has its first and last detection, the number of detections, the strongest fire radiative power (a measure of the heat given off), and a link to the official US incident when one is close enough. - Current fire incidents (
fire-incidents): every current US wildfire, prescribed fire and complex in IRWIN, the interagency system fire managers report to. Each has a name, point of origin, size in acres, containment, cause and personnel. - Fire perimeters (
fire-perimeters): the current mapped outlines of US fires as GeoJSON, plus an archive of each shape and snapshot since the dataset started, so you can follow a fire’s growth after NIFC drops it. - Smoke plumes (
smoke): NOAA’s daily smoke polygons over North America for the last 7 days, labelled Light, Medium or Heavy.
What the site adds is the join. Each event says whether it falls inside a perimeter, near one, or near a reported origin point. Events seen on 5 or more days in the same place with no incident nearby are flagged as a likely industrial source, such as a steel mill or a gas flare. The site checks its sources every 3 hours.
What it misses
A detection is not a fire. NASA’s FIRMS FAQ says each detection marks the centre of a pixel that contains at least one fire, not the fire’s exact location or size. A VIIRS pixel is about 375 m across. One detection can be a small burn or part of a large one.
Some detections aren’t wildfires. FIRMS lists false alarms over bright surfaces such as metal factory roofs, gas flares, volcanoes, and artifacts after satellite manoeuvres. Prescribed burns are real fires, set on purpose, and they show up too. The site’s static-source flag catches some industrial heat, not all of it.
Many fires are missed. FIRMS gives the reasons: a fire can start and end between passes, cloud, heavy smoke or tree canopy can hide it, and it can be too small or too cool to detect. VIIRS covers the globe about every 12 hours, so each place gets only a few looks a day.
Near-real-time data is rougher. The site uses FIRMS’s near-real-time products. FIRMS says their positions are usually accurate to under 100 m but can be off by several kilometres after a spacecraft manoeuvre. Its science-quality versions come out months later.
Incidents are what agencies report, and they drop off. The incident list holds only fires reported to IRWIN that aren’t yet declared contained, controlled or out. NIFC removes stale records: a fire under 10 acres disappears after 3 days without an update, one of 10 to 100 acres after 8 days, a larger one after 14. Acres are the size last reported, not a live measurement. The incident data is US only, so Canadian detections never link to one. When we tested it, only 61 of 4,386 US fire events had a linked incident.
Smoke is a picture, not air quality. NOAA analysts draw the plumes from daytime satellite images. NOAA says cloud can leave the smoke map incomplete. The site notes that the density labels describe smoke anywhere in the air column, not what people breathe at the ground.
It’s a copy, and a short one. Active fires and smoke cover only the last 7 days. For anything about safety, follow local fire officials. NOAA’s HMS page says decisions such as evacuations shouldn’t be made on its fire locations without other information to confirm them.
How to access it
1Browse the datasets
Start at wildfiredata.dev/datasets/. Each dataset page has a preview, the columns with units, the license and credit line, and every URL for that dataset.
2List what’s there
curl -s "https://api.wildfiredata.dev/v1/catalog"
When we tested it on 14 November 2026, this listed the four datasets with their current versions. The active fires ran from 7 to 14 November.
3Get the fire events for one country
Active fires are split by country, usa or can:
curl -s "https://api.wildfiredata.dev/v1/active-fires/table/usa.json"
This returned 4,386 US events. 61 were linked to an incident and 108 were flagged as likely static sources. The current incidents come the same way, by state, or all at once from /v1/fire-incidents/table/all.json (304 incidents that day).
4Get the files
Perimeters and smoke are files, not tables, and their metadata doesn’t list them, so use these paths. Perimeters: https://api.wildfiredata.dev/v1/fire-perimeters/current.geojson for today’s outlines, with perimeters/index.json and snapshots/index.json indexing the archive. Smoke: https://api.wildfiredata.dev/v1/smoke/latest.geojson, one file per day under smoke/days/YYYY-MM-DD.geojson, and smoke/index.json. Tables also download whole as CSV or Parquet, for example https://api.wildfiredata.dev/v1/active-fires/download/active-fires.csv.
5Read the docs
The docs cover the URL scheme, formats, versions and the limit of 120 requests a minute without a key. The API reference lists every endpoint.
How to cite it
Fire data changes by the hour, so the version matters. Every update gets a version id, and putting it after the dataset id freezes the data:
curl -s "https://api.wildfiredata.dev/v1/active-fires@2026-11-01.fb14dbf8a3"
/v1/{dataset}/versions lists the recent versions and one snapshot per month. Most versions are removed after about 30 days, but the first of each month is kept for good, and the docs say to cite those. Cite the agency first, use the site’s exact credit line, and give the pinned URL. For example:
NASA LANCE FIRMS, VIIRS 375 m Active Fire NRT (S-NPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21); incident data from the National Interagency Fire Center, Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services (WFIGS). Active fires (US and Canada), version 2026-11-01.fb14dbf8a3. Via wildfiredata.dev, https://api.wildfiredata.dev/v1/active-fires@2026-11-01.fb14dbf8a3. Accessed 14 November 2026.
The FIRMS credit line also asks you to give the DOI of each VIIRS product; the site’s sources page has them. The NASA and NIFC data are US government works, and NOAA’s smoke data is CC0, so all of it can be reused.
Sources & further reading
- wildfiredata.dev: datasets
- wildfiredata.dev: docs (versions, formats, limits)
- wildfiredata.dev: sources and licenses
- NASA Earthdata, FIRMS frequently asked questions
- NIFC, Current Wildland Fire Incident Locations (WFIGS)
- NIFC, WFIGS Current Interagency Fire Perimeters
- NOAA OSPO, Hazard Mapping System Fire and Smoke Product
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