The fastest way to answer:
“Is that fire near me?”
Fire Nearby aggregates the official wildfire feeds for the United States and Canada into one live map and a page for every state, province, and fire. It exists because checking on a wildfire should take seconds, not a tour of half a dozen agency websites.
Why we are different
Official sources only
Everything on this site comes from the agencies that actually manage incidents and operate the satellites: NIFC/IRWIN for US fires, cross-checked against the state agencies that fight them (CAL FIRE, the Florida Forest Service, the South Carolina Forestry Commission, and the Kentucky Division of Forestry), the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System from Natural Resources Canada, NASA FIRMS and NOAA GOES for satellite heat, and WildCAD-E and CHP dispatch centers for new-incident reports. No scraping news articles, no crowdsourced guesses.
Always timestamped
Every layer, table, and stat shows when it was last updated. If a feed is delayed upstream, we say so on this page instead of pretending the data is current.
The full picture on one map
Active fires, official perimeters, satellite heat detections, smoke plumes and smoke forecasts, fire spread forecasts, lightning, open shelters, live wildfire cameras, air quality, animated wind flow, and fire, wind, and heat alerts, all togglable on a single fast map with satellite and 3D terrain views. Most sites make you visit three or four government pages to piece this together.
Early signals before a fire has a name
Most fire maps wait for an official incident report, which can lag hours behind a brand-new fire. We layer three faster signals underneath it: NASA FIRMS ultra real-time satellite heat pulled direct from the source, GOES geostationary scans that flag active burning every 5 minutes, and live responder dispatch feeds. When any of these light up near your searched location with no reported fire attached, your risk report flags it as an early signal, often before any other public source.
Satellite heat direct from the source
For satellite hotspots we pull NASA FIRMS ultra real-time (URT) VIIRS and MODIS detections straight from NASA, usually within an hour of each pass, tagged with confidence and fire radiative power. Many maps relay a slower, secondhand feed that updates far less often, so ours is denser and fresher. If NASA ever hiccups, we fall back automatically to the CWFIS relay so the layer never goes dark.
Live evacuation zone status
Where governments publish live zone-level evacuation data (statewide in California and Oregon, province-wide in British Columbia and Alberta, plus county feeds in Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Idaho, and Minnesota), we show whether an address sits inside a zone under an Evacuation Order or Warning, refreshed every 5 minutes straight from emergency managers. Most fire maps stop at the fire; we answer the question that actually matters: do I need to leave?
Built to be fast
We poll the agencies on a schedule, cache everything on our servers, and serve you prebuilt pages. You never wait on a slow government API, and your visit never adds load to emergency infrastructure.
US and Canada together
Wildfire smoke does not respect borders. We cover all 50 states plus Canadian provinces and territories in one place, with per-region pages and historical context for each.
History, not just headlines
Each location page includes decades of fire history: yearly trends, the largest fires on record, and human impact data from ICS-209-PLUS incident reports and the Canadian National Fire Database.
How to read the map
The layers are ordered by how early each signal arrives. A brand-new fire usually shows up on Fire Nearby in this order:
- 1. Dispatch report (ring): a 911 call or dispatch log, often minutes after someone first sees smoke.
- 2. Early heat (magenta dot): a GOES satellite pixel from a 5-minute scan, if the fire grows large and hot enough.
- 3. Aircraft on scene (plane icon): tankers, scoopers, and helicopters squawking the fire-traffic code, often overhead within the first hour of a serious start.
- 4. Satellite heat (orange dot): a precise VIIRS/MODIS detection at the next polar-orbiter pass, usually within a few hours.
- 5. Active fire (flame): a named, confirmed incident, with perimeters, evacuation zones, and alerts following as agencies map it.
So if you see a dispatch ring or an early-heat dot with no flame nearby, you may be looking at a fire that no other public map shows yet. Here is what each layer means:
Active fires: confirmed incidents from NIFC, CAL FIRE, state forestry agencies, and CWFIS. Color tracks containment (red 0% to green 100%) and size tracks acres. Turn on the wind flow layer to see which way the wind is pushing each fire.
Contained fires (100%): fully contained incidents, kept on the map behind their own toggle. A green flame means crews hold the entire perimeter and no further spread is expected; useful for understanding what recently burned near you without mistaking it for an active threat.
Prescribed burns: planned burns that agencies set intentionally to reduce fuels, reported through the same official feeds. A flame in this green-teal tint is expected fire, not an emergency, though you may still see or smell its smoke.
Dispatch reports: live logs from federal wildfire dispatch centers (WildCAD) and CHP, minutes old. They use dispatcher shorthand, explained by the info icon on each report: Smoke check means someone reported smoke and crews are investigating; Wildfire means dispatch is treating it as a vegetation fire; Nonstatistical fire is a minor fire like a debris pile; False alarm means crews checked and found no fire. Even the false alarms are useful: they tell you a smoke report near you was already resolved.
Firefighting aircraft: live positions of aircraft squawking the fire-traffic transponder code: air tankers, scoopers, helicopters, and spotter planes, each drawn with its own silhouette and pointed the way it is flying. Tap one for its type, altitude, and speed. Aircraft circling an area are one of the strongest confirmations that a response is underway, but they also fly reconnaissance and repositioning legs, so a single plane overhead does not by itself mean fire below.
Early heat (GOES): fire pixels from geostationary satellites that rescan the US every 5 minutes. Sparse and coarse (each pixel is about 2 km), and quiet periods are normal: it only trips on sizable, actively burning heat. Treat a pixel as "a satellite sees something hot here right now", not an exact fire location.
Satellite heat: NASA FIRMS VIIRS/MODIS detections from the last 24 hours at 375 m resolution. Inside a known fire, the dots show where it is actively burning; an isolated cluster with no incident nearby is an early signal worth watching.
Wildfire cameras: the ALERTCalifornia and ALERTWildfire lookout camera networks, about 1,400 pan-tilt-zoom cameras across California and neighboring states. The wedge on each dot shows the direction the camera is facing right now, refreshed every few minutes; tap one to watch its live view right on the map, with an angle switcher for sites that host more than one camera. Off by default: turn it on in the layer panel when you want to see a fire with your own eyes.
Fire perimeters: the officially mapped edge of the fire, from agency GIS teams. Usually hours behind the real edge on a fast-moving fire; the satellite heat dots show you where it has grown since.
Evacuation zones: hatched areas straight from emergency managers. Red means Evacuation Order (leave now), amber means Warning (be ready), blue means Shelter in Place.
Smoke plumes: gray polygons drawn by NOAA satellite analysts. Darker means denser smoke overhead; it tells you about air quality, not fire location.
Smoke forecast (18h): where NOAA’s HRRR-Smoke weather model expects surface smoke over the next 18 hours. Turn it on and an hour scrubber appears so you can step through the forecast.
Spread forecast (5d): orange arrival bands from the ELMFIRE physics model (Pyrecast) showing where a major fire could burn within 12 hours to 5 days if no containment succeeds. Only a handful of big fires get forecast runs at a time; an orange ring marks each one on the map, and clicking it zooms to the bands. Treat it as a planning envelope, not a prediction: real spread is usually smaller.
Weather alerts: dashed outlines are National Weather Service fire (amber), wind (blue), and heat (pink) alerts. Tap any zone to read the official alert text.
Fire weather outlook: NOAA Storm Prediction Center areas where wind, humidity, and dry fuels favor fast fire spread (Elevated, Critical, Extreme). Empty is normal: no shading means no elevated fire weather is forecast.
Lightning (24h): strikes from the last 24 hours, from the GOES optical sensor and a ground receiver network, fading as they age. A strike in dry fuels can smolder for days before flaring into a visible fire (a holdover fire).
Open shelters: evacuation shelters that are open right now, from FEMA’s National Shelter System (the feed the Red Cross reports into). Usually empty on a quiet day; it fills in around an active disaster.
Wind flow: an animated overlay of current wind direction and speed, with faster particles meaning stronger wind. Wind is the single biggest driver of where a fire goes next.
Air quality: the optional AQI layer shows the US Air Quality Index from green (good) to maroon (hazardous), from EPA AirNow ground monitors with a model filling the gaps between them.
A few map tricks beyond the layers: the toolbar switches the basemap to satellite imagery or 3D terrain, and clicking any fire, polygon, or dot opens a card explaining exactly what you are looking at.
Where the data comes from
Active fires (US): the National Interagency Fire Center’s WFIGS system, fed by IRWIN, the same integrated reporting pipeline dispatch centers use. We pull the full year-to-date record and apply our own recency rules rather than the pre-filtered “current” feed most maps use, which silently drops still-burning fires. Incidents are also cross-checked against the state agencies that fight them: CAL FIRE (California), the Florida Forest Service, the South Carolina Forestry Commission, the Kentucky Division of Forestry, and the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, whose numbers often update hours before the federal sync.
Active fires (Canada): the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (CWFIS), run by Natural Resources Canada.
Perimeters: official WFIGS incident perimeters, simplified server-side so maps load fast without losing shape.
Satellite hotspots: NASA FIRMS ultra real-time (URT) VIIRS and MODIS detections, pulled straight from NASA typically within an hour of each satellite pass. Most fire maps show these secondhand through a slower daily relay; we go to the source, so you get more detections, sooner, each tagged with a confidence level and fire radiative power. If the NASA feed ever stalls, we fall back automatically to the CWFIS relay so the layer is never blank.
Early heat (GOES): the geostationary GOES-18 and GOES-19 satellites stare at the western hemisphere and rescan the continental US every 5 minutes, flagging pixels that are actively burning. Because they never look away, they can catch a large, fast-growing fire in the gaps between the polar-orbiting VIIRS and MODIS passes that most maps rely on. The trade-off is coarser 2 km resolution and fewer pixels, so we treat GOES as an early corroborating signal rather than a precise location.
Dispatch reports: new-incident feeds from the systems responders themselves use: WildCAD-E federal interagency dispatch centers nationwide and California Highway Patrol CAD. These often name a wildland fire minutes after the first 911 call, before it reaches the official incident systems.
Firefighting aircraft: live ADS-B transponder positions for aircraft squawking 1255, the code assigned to US firefighting traffic: air tankers, scoopers, helicopters, air attack, and lead planes. Positions come from the open ADS-B receiver network and refresh about every 3 minutes; recent tracks stay visible for 30 minutes after the last ping.
Wildfire cameras: camera locations and live facing directions from Cal OES’s consolidated statewide webcams layer, covering the ALERTCalifornia network (UC San Diego / CAL FIRE) and the ALERTWildfire network (University of Nevada, Reno consortium). Live views play right on the map from each network’s public frames, credited to and owned by the networks.
Smoke: NOAA’s Hazard Mapping System smoke analysis, drawn by satellite analysts. The 18-hour smoke forecast comes from NOAA’s HRRR-Smoke weather model, regenerated hourly.
Spread forecasts: the Pyrecast platform’s public ELMFIRE fire-spread model runs (Pyregence Consortium), refreshed about daily for major active fires. We show the median-weather scenario as arrival-time bands.
Lightning: optical flash detections from the GOES Geostationary Lightning Mapper plus the Blitzortung community ground receiver network, binned to a ~6 mile grid over the last 24 hours.
Open shelters: FEMA’s National Shelter System, the live feed the Red Cross and partner agencies report into. Only shelters currently open appear.
Weather alerts: National Weather Service fire, wind, and heat products (Red Flag Warnings, High Wind Warnings, Heat Advisories, and more), each linking to the official NWS record.
Evacuation zones: live zone-level status refreshed every 5 minutes from official feeds: the CAL FIRE / Cal OES statewide layer (California), Oregon OEM, EmergencyInfoBC (British Columbia), the Alberta Emergency Management Agency, and county emergency management feeds in Washington (Spokane, Stevens), Colorado (Boulder, Larimer, Routt, Grand, Douglas), Arizona (Coconino), Idaho (Blaine), and Minnesota (St. Louis, Lake, Cook). Where no live feed exists, we say so.
Air quality: readings from US EPA AirNow ground monitors (the same sensors behind AirNow.gov) whenever one is within 35 miles, with Open-Meteo’s air quality model filling the map layer and locations without a nearby monitor.
Fire weather outlooks: NOAA Storm Prediction Center Day 1 and Day 2 fire weather outlooks, the forecast that tells you whether tomorrow looks dangerous before any warning is issued.
Official incident updates: InciWeb, the interagency incident information system where fire management teams post their updates, matched to each fire’s page.
Wind: current wind speed and direction at every significant fire from Open-Meteo’s forecast model, shown in fire popups and factored into near-me risk reports. The animated wind-flow layer is driven by NOAA’s GFS global model, refreshed every few hours.
History: NIFC incident archives, ICS-209-PLUS research dataset (US impact reports 1999–2020), and the Canadian National Fire Database. Browse it in the US archive and Canada archive.
Data freshness, live
Transparency is the product. This is the current health of every upstream source we aggregate; the same staleness checks drive warnings across the site.
The Fire Nearby Signal Lab
Behind the public map, we run an ongoing research program focused on one question: how early can a brand-new wildfire be identified from open signals alone? Around the clock, our fusion engine ingests independent early indicators: satellite fire-detection AI, thermal hotspot scans, live dispatch traffic, and ground-level air-quality anomalies. When unrelated signals agree in the same place and window of time, the engine forms a scored candidate.
Every candidate is then tracked to its real-world outcome. When an official incident is later declared at that location, we record exactly how many minutes our first signal preceded the official discovery; candidates that never become incidents are logged as misses. Day by day, this audit builds a labeled dataset of what the world looks like in the minutes before a fire is confirmed, and it holds our detection work to a measurable accuracy standard rather than a hunch.
Findings from this program are published on the site only once they meet the same standard as everything else here: sourced, timestamped, and verifiably accurate.
Explore the Signal Lab: our research, dataset, and modelContact
Fire Nearby is operated by JBL Group LLC. Questions, corrections, or partnership inquiries: firenearbysupport@gmail.com.
Always follow official guidance
Fire Nearby aggregates data from official government sources and shows exactly when each value was last updated. During an active emergency, always follow evacuation instructions from local authorities, and sign up for your county or province’s official alerting system.