About GISFire

What GISFire is

GISFire is a 3D interactive map of active fires worldwide, France and Europe first, built from NASA FIRMS satellite detections (VIIRS and MODIS sensors) and recomputed every 30 minutes.

The area covered has been the whole planet since 6 September 2026: detections, grouped fires, their burnt areas and the smoke plumes no longer stop at a border. What remains specific to France and Europe are the layers that depend on local sources: press reports, prefecture statements and state aircraft recognised by their callsign.

Around the fire detections, the map overlays several layers: smoke (NASA GIBS imagery, VIIRS True Color at 250 m, one mosaic per day), observed and forecast wind up to 48 h ahead (Open-Meteo), and ADS-B tracking of the French Sécurité civile water bombers via adsb.lol (Canadair CL-415, Dash 8 Q400 MR, Air Tractor AT-802, helicopters and coordination aircraft). History is kept for 30 days, and the timeline replays the last 12 hours, 24 hours or 7 days. The "All 7 d" mode instead stacks a full week of detections, to show the area a wildfire has covered rather than its current front.

Who it is for

GISFire is for anyone who wants to locate a fire and understand its context: residents and travellers trying to find out what is burning near them, journalists checking the scale of a wildfire, foresters, managers of natural areas, researchers, or simply people curious about the fire season.

In practice, the map helps you spot active fires in a region, follow their evolution over several days with the timeline, see where the smoke is heading by crossing plumes and wind, and watch the aerial firefighting assets at work when they broadcast ADS-B.

Where the data comes from

Active fire detections come from NASA FIRMS, in near real time. Two sensor families are used: VIIRS (375 m resolution), flown on the Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 satellites, and MODIS (1 km resolution), flown on Terra and Aqua.

About 3 hours elapse between satellite acquisition and the publication of the detections. GISFire queries FIRMS and recomputes the map every 30 minutes, which does not shorten that latency: the freshest data displayed is already a few hours old.

Raw detections, called hot pixels, are then grouped into events by DBSCAN clustering (2,500 m radius, minimum 3 points, 48 h sliding window). An event therefore gathers the successive detections of a single fire, which avoids counting the same wildfire several times. Full details on sources and methodology are on the credits and limitations page.

The layers, and what they are worth

Four layers sit on top of the detections. Two are observations, two are computations, and the map does not present them the same way. The distinction matters: a measurement can be debated, a model has to be interpreted.

All of these layers are free and account-free on the public map, like fire detections, burnt areas, reported fires, aircraft positions and orbits, clouds and smoke, wind and the satellite basemap. What costs money is taking the data away: per download on each fire page and on the map, or at no extra charge with GISFire Pro, at 49 euros excl. VAT a month.

Aircraft and drop activity

Water bomber positions come from public ADS-B. The drops themselves are announced by no one: they are inferred from the flight profile: a descent, a low pass, a climb back out. Skimming the pines, the aircraft even sinks below the receivers' horizon, and it is that silence that gives the drop away.

The product dropped is not broadcast either: it is deduced from the aircraft type. Canadair and Air Tractor for water, Dash 8 and A400M for retardant. The distinction is not cosmetic: water falls on the flames, retardant is laid ahead of the front, on the intended stop line. A pink area therefore says where the firefighters think the fire is going, not where it is.

Wind

Animated streamlines built from the 10 m wind forecast by Open-Meteo, archived hour by hour over seven days. Stepping back in the timeline therefore shows the wind as it was at that moment, which often explains the direction a fire front took.

Smoke plume

An estimate, not an observation. From each notable fire, a puff is released every hour and carried through the real wind field, hour after hour: the trajectory bends on its own instead of following a straight cone. The width does not come from a preset angle but from measured uncertainty: when the forecast wind swings a lot, the plume opens up and fades.

Three acknowledged limits. The wind used is the surface wind, corrected to approximate the transport wind aloft without matching it. Terrain is ignored: no mountain range blocks the plume. And this layer says where and when, never how much.

Air quality

Fine particulate matter PM2.5 from the European CAMS model. PM2.5 and not PM10: wildfire smoke is made of fine particles, whereas PM10 mostly captures dust, pollen and road traffic particles.

This is a model forecast, not a measurement. The reference measurements are those of Geodair and the accredited regional networks, far scarcer and not covering everywhere: the model computes everywhere, the stations measure somewhere. Nothing is displayed as long as the air stays acceptable, so a map without colour is good news, not an outage.

For any health guidance, rely on your regional air quality body and the local authorities. This map observes, it does not prescribe.

What GISFire does not do

GISFire is not an operational alert tool. The 3-hour latency and the satellites' revisit rate rule it out: polar-orbiting satellites only pass over a given point 2 to 4 times a day. A fire can therefore start, spread, even be put out between two passes without ever appearing on the map.

Nor is a hot pixel always a wildfire. Industrial flares, agricultural burns and solar reflections trigger detections that are legitimate from the sensor's point of view, but unrelated to a vegetation fire. Grouping into events filters out part of these cases, not all of them.

In an emergency, rely on the competent authorities and official instructions, never on this map. The most common questions are answered on the FAQ page.

Understanding forest fires

What a forest fire is, how a satellite detects it, how to read the map and where the world burns season by season: all of it is explained on the page forest fire.

GISFire is co-published by SARO and Gistin, under the direction of Julien Sarrau. To report an error or ask about a detection: contact@saro.app. The legal notice gives the publisher's full identity.