Credits, sources & limits

Data

• Active fire detections: NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System): VIIRS 375 m sensors (NOAA-20, NOAA-21, Suomi-NPP) and MODIS 1 km (Terra, Aqua), NRT feed. We thank NASA LANCE/ESDIS for making this data available.
• Base map: © CARTO · © OpenStreetMap contributors (fallback: OpenFreeMap).
• Aircraft tracking: ADS-B positions of the French civil-protection fleet via adsb.lol. Coverage depends on ground receivers: an aircraft missing from the map may be flying. The live positions and the same network's daily archives (globe_history) are published under the ODbL 1.0 licence (https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/). 3D models: Canadair provided by the publisher; “Bombardier Dash Q400 - Qantas Link” by Sofyan Kurniawan (CC BY); “EC 135” by GRIP420 (CC BY); “A400M” by XRTL (CC BY); “Air Tractor AT-502” by AlexMish (CC BY-NC), rescaled to the AT-802. Aircraft photos: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY and CC BY-SA (Cjp24, Pedro Aragão, Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart); A400M Atlas by Laurent Marboeuf; Air Tractor AT-802 Fire Boss by Global Jet; Beechcraft King Air 200 (F-HCEV, DGAC) by Monaam Ben Fredj; MD-87 by Grigory Heaton, DC-10 by Thornfield Hall, S-2T Tracker by AstroDominant (CC BY-SA), PZL M-18 Dromader by Tony Hisgett (CC BY).
• Satellite imagery: Sentinel-2 cloudless © EOX (CC BY 4.0), a cloud-free world mosaic derived from ESA Copernicus Sentinel-2 images (2016). Over France, at close zoom, the map switches to the IGN orthophotos (Géoplateforme, Licence Ouverte 2.0).
• Sentinel-2 images: Copernicus Sentinel data, ESA, through the AWS Earth Search catalogue (Element 84). GISFire's severity products contain modified Copernicus Sentinel data.
• Lightning: EUMETSAT, Meteosat Lightning Imager (LI), CC BY 4.0, over Europe, Africa and the Middle East; NOAA, Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) of the GOES satellites, over the Americas. Asia and Oceania are not covered.
• Smoke plumes: NASA GIBS (Global Imagery Browse Services), VIIRS True Color 250 m.
• Wind: NOAA GFS (Global Forecast System), 10 m wind over the whole world, 0.5 degree, NOAA Open Data Dissemination programme, public domain. Our server reads it from the public copy on Amazon Web Services.
• Air quality, place search and fallback wind over Europe: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0).
• Wildfire carbon emissions and smoke aerosols: Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS, ECMWF), GFAS and atmospheric composition forecasts, CC BY 4.0. Contains modified Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service information 2026. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of this information.
• Relief: Mapterhorn (Terrarium format), open elevation tiles assembled from public terrain models, including IGN LiDAR HD and RGE ALTI over France and the Copernicus DEM elsewhere, for the 3D relief of the map. Terrain Tiles from AWS Open Data, built by Mapzen from public elevation sources (SRTM, GMTED, USGS and others), for the Saumos fire scene on the home page.

Method

The map distinguishes two objects. A hot pixel is a raw satellite detection: a thermal anomaly seen by a sensor at a given moment. Its colour follows the fire radiative power (FRP, in megawatts): pale yellow for a weak fire, deep red for extreme blazes; in wide view the height of the 3D columns also follows FRP. When zooming in, its real ground footprint is shown (scan×track rectangle provided by FIRMS, ~375 m for VIIRS, ≥1 km for MODIS) over satellite imagery. The fire event (white circle) aggregates these detections by spatial proximity: DBSCAN clustering in the database (PostGIS ST_ClusterDBSCAN, 2,500 m radius in Web Mercator projection, minimum 3 detections, 48-hour sliding window), recomputed after every ingestion.

Data is stored in WGS 84 (EPSG:4326) and served as vector tiles generated in Web Mercator (EPSG:3857). Since the clustering radius is expressed in Mercator metres, it corresponds to a shorter ground distance at high latitudes (~1,770 m at 45°).

Limits to know

• Latency: the FIRMS NRT feed is available about 3 hours after satellite acquisition. The map is not an operational alerting tool.
• A hot pixel is not always a wildfire: industrial flares, steelworks, volcanoes or sun glint can trigger detections. Grouping into events (≥ 3 detections) filters part of these false positives.
• Resolution: 375 m (VIIRS) and 1 km (MODIS). A pixel does not outline the fire, and small fires or fires under cloud cover can escape detection.
• Temporal coverage: polar satellites pass roughly twice a day per satellite over a given point; a fire can be active between two passes with no recent detection.

Technology

Next.js (App Router, TypeScript) · MapLibre GL JS · deck.gl (interleaved rendering, FRP extrusion) · PostgreSQL/PostGIS (vector tiles ST_AsMVT, clustering ST_ClusterDBSCAN) · TailwindCSS.

Planned evolutions

Geostationary sources (Meteosat SEVIRI, GOES ABI: 10-15 min cadence, but 2-3 km resolution and more false positives) and EFFIS/Copernicus burnt-area perimeters.

What the map costs

Satellite data is open and free; serving it is not: server, database and vector tiles amount to about €200 a month. They are covered by the GISFire Pro subscription and by one-off data sales; the public map stays free and ad-free for everyone.