Reading the Fire Map

Flame icons: active, contained, and prescribed

Each flame on the map is an officially reported wildfire from the National Interagency Fire Center's WFIGS system (fed by IRWIN, the same pipeline dispatch centers use), cross-checked against state agencies like CAL FIRE, or, in Canada, the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. Bigger flames mean more acres; the color runs from red (0% contained) through orange and yellow to green (fully contained). Tap a fire to see its current wind speed, one of the best clues for how it may behave, and turn on the wind flow layer to watch which way the wind is pushing it.

Two flame variants have their own toggles. Contained fires (100%) render as green flames: crews hold the entire perimeter and no further spread is expected, useful context for what recently burned nearby. Prescribed burns render in a distinct green-teal tint: planned burns agencies set intentionally to reduce fuels, so a flame in that color is expected fire, not an emergency, even if you can see or smell its smoke.

Live response: dispatch reports and firefighting aircraft

Violet rings are live dispatch reports from federal wildfire dispatch centers (WildCAD) and CHP, often posted minutes after the first 911 call and usually the earliest public trace of a brand-new fire. They use dispatcher shorthand, explained on each report: a Smoke check means crews are investigating a report, Wildfire means dispatch is treating it as a vegetation fire, and False alarm means crews checked and found nothing, which is itself useful information.

Plane icons are live positions of firefighting 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 strongly suggest an active response below, but they also fly reconnaissance and repositioning legs, so one plane overhead does not by itself mean fire.

Satellite heat: VIIRS/MODIS hotspots and GOES early heat

Orange dots are heat detections from the VIIRS and MODIS satellite sensors over the last 24 hours. Satellites detect thermal anomalies roughly 375 meters across, so hotspots show where heat is concentrated even before a perimeter is mapped.

Magenta dots are early heat from the geostationary GOES satellites, which rescan the continental US every 5 minutes. They are much coarser (a pixel is about 2 km) and only trip on sizable, actively burning heat, so read one as "a satellite sees something hot here right now", not an exact fire location. Because GOES never looks away, it can catch a fast-growing fire in the hours between polar-orbiter passes.

Caveats: satellites can miss fires under heavy smoke or cloud, and they sometimes flag industrial heat sources. A cluster of fresh hotspots outside a mapped perimeter usually means the fire is growing in that direction.

Wildfire cameras: see it with your own eyes

The optional wildfire cameras layer shows about 1,400 lookout cameras from two networks: ALERTCalifornia (run by UC San Diego with CAL FIRE, over 1,000 cameras statewide) and ALERTWildfire (a University of Nevada, Reno consortium covering Nevada and parts of neighboring states). These are the same pan-tilt-zoom cameras fire agencies use to confirm smoke reports; on a clear day one can see 60 miles, and at night twice that.

Each camera draws as a teal dot with a wedge showing the direction it is pointing right now, refreshed every few minutes from Cal OES's consolidated feed. Operators steer these cameras during incidents, so several wedges converging on one spot often means something is being watched there. Tap a camera to see its name, elevation, and current heading, and to watch its live view right on the map; sites that host several cameras include an angle switcher so you can look in every direction.

The layer is off by default (1,400 dots would crowd the western map). Turn it on from the layer panel when there is smoke or a heat detection near you and you want a live look before official word arrives.

Perimeters: the fire's actual footprint

The red outlines are official incident perimeters mapped by firefighting agencies, usually from infrared aircraft flights or GPS mapping by crews. They show where the fire has burned, not necessarily where it is actively burning right now.

Perimeters lag reality by hours because they require a mapping flight and data processing. A fire can be well outside its last mapped perimeter during a wind event, which is why perimeters are best read together with satellite hotspots.

Evacuation zones: the layer that answers "do I need to leave?"

Hatched zones come straight from emergency managers where live zone-level feeds exist (statewide in California and Oregon, province-wide in British Columbia and Alberta, plus several county feeds). Red hatching means Evacuation Order: leave now. Amber means Warning: be ready to leave at a moment's notice. Blue means Shelter in Place.

Zones refresh every 5 minutes, but always treat local authorities as the final word: if officials at your door or your county's alert system say go, go.

Smoke, weather alerts, and air quality

The gray smoke layer comes from NOAA's Hazard Mapping System, where analysts outline visible smoke in satellite imagery each day. Light gray is thin, high-altitude smoke; darker gray is dense smoke more likely to affect air quality at the ground.

Dashed colored zones are active National Weather Service alerts: red-orange for fire weather, blue for wind, and pink-red for heat. Tap any zone to read the official alert text. The optional air-quality layer adds the US AQI on the EPA's color scale, from green (good) to maroon (hazardous), using AirNow ground monitors with a model filling the gaps.

Forecast layers: where smoke and fire are headed

The smoke forecast layer shows where NOAA's HRRR-Smoke weather model expects surface smoke over the next 18 hours. Turn it on and an hour scrubber appears above the map so you can step through the forecast hour by hour; darker bands mean thicker smoke at nose level, the kind that actually affects breathing.

The spread forecast layer draws arrival-time bands from ELMFIRE, the fire-spread physics model behind the Pyrecast platform: darker orange could burn within 12 hours of the forecast run, lighter shades within 24 hours, 48 hours, and 5 days. It answers the question a perimeter cannot: not where the fire is, but where it could go. Only a handful of major fires get public forecast runs at a time, so an orange ring labeled Spread forecast marks each one; click it and the map zooms to the bands.

Read spread forecasts as a planning envelope, not a prediction. The model assumes no containment action succeeds, so real spread is usually smaller. We show the median-weather scenario (the 50th percentile of the model's weather ensemble).

Lightning, open shelters, and wind flow

The lightning layer shows strikes from the last 24 hours, combining optical flash detections from the GOES Geostationary Lightning Mapper with the Blitzortung community ground receiver network, binned to a roughly 6 mile grid. Dots fade as strikes age. Lightning matters beyond the storm itself: a strike in dry fuels can smolder unseen for days before flaring into a visible fire, what firefighters call a holdover fire.

The open shelters layer shows evacuation shelters that are open right now, from FEMA's National Shelter System, the live feed the Red Cross and partner agencies report into. On a quiet day it may be nearly empty nationwide; that is accurate, not broken. It fills in around an active disaster, exactly when "where do I go?" becomes the question.

The wind flow layer animates current winds as moving particles across the whole map, driven by NOAA's GFS global model: faster streaks mean stronger wind. Wind is the single biggest driver of where a fire goes next, so watch which way the particles stream past a fire you care about.

Map views: streets, satellite, and 3D terrain

The map toolbar can swap the street basemap for satellite imagery (useful for judging vegetation and terrain around a fire) or a 3D terrain view that drapes the layers over relief, since slope is a major driver of fire behavior: fire runs uphill fast.

Every layer is clickable. Fires, hotspots, lightning cells, shelters, forecast bands, outlook areas, smoke polygons, and alert zones all open a card explaining exactly what you are looking at, with the source and timestamp.