Live wildfire map

Fire Maps home

Fire Maps

by José DA COSTA

🇺🇸
Workspace actions112 across the European Union and the EEA / 999. instructions come from the authorities, not from this map

Add a layer from one of the sections below.

No detections in view over the last 24 h.

No detections in view over this window.

Interval drawn inside it

The dark surface is all the ground seen burning over the record above; the warm one inside it is the interval you chose. Each detection is drawn at the size of the ground its sensor pixel covered, so this is ground the satellites observed burning, never a surveyed perimeter. Permanent heat sources — plants, flares — accumulate here too, and no area figure is published.

Uncertain by nature: a heat point can be hidden by clouds, and ground can have burned between two satellite points — the difference from an official perimeter can be huge.

Line detail

The server serves the pinned detail when the view fits its budget; otherwise it serves the finest that fits, and the figure above says which.

No official delineation in view: rapid mapping is activated for a few major fires per season, so most burns only ever have the sensor evidence above.

Add near-real-time observation layers straight from their source — no API key. A hotspot is a satellite measurement, never an exact flame line.

Active fire
Satellite imagery

Reading the last flights…

No positioned aircraft in the current selection.

Time
Presets

Today starts at local midnight; 1 d covers the previous 24 hours. The 2–7 d and 14 d filters also align on midnight, so a working day is never cut in half — firefighting aircraft barely fly at night (about 6 % of recorded activity).

Rewindnow

Up to 24 h comes straight from the ADS-B network. Anything older is served from this server’s own archive, which is still empty and deepens for as long as the server keeps recording.

Mission589/589
131
85
261
55
57
Country
589/589
3
25
2
89
3
1
1
10
1
6
6
87
23
16
5
22
2
2
16
3
31
1
5
6
97
8
4
25
6
83
Trail altitude
ground42,600 ft+

Keep only the lowest bands to see where an aircraft actually worked: scooping runs and drops happen a few hundred feet up, transit legs thousands. Bands are barometric altitude above sea level — over high terrain a working pass sits in a higher band.

Mission insight
0
0
Water scoop
Drop
Hover refill
Water pickup
Ground stop
Observation orbit
Unidentified low pass
Probable fire zone

Deduced from the flight profiles — dips, speeds, climb-outs and water–fire rotations. A scoop marks the water source; drops cluster where the fire is. Deductions, not reports.

Collecting trajectories…

Positions come from volunteer ADS-B receivers: aircraft working low over a fire drop out of coverage regularly, so a dashed gap in a trail is not an absence of activity.

Sampling the view…

  • Wind speed
  • Calm0+ km/h
  • Gentle breeze12+ km/h
  • Fresh breeze29+ km/h
  • Near gale50+ km/h
  • Strong gale75+ km/h

Wind at 10 m, sampled over the view. Animated paths continuously resample the local vector, so they bend when the forecast direction changes across distance. Their pace follows the local wind speed on a legible scale — faster where it blows harder — never real-time speed. Reduced-motion devices keep a static flow whose streak length says the same. Best-match forecast from Open-Meteo — a model, not a station measurement.

Running the scenario…

H+48

Forecast time unavailable

H+48
DetailedConditionalWind only

Wind outlook H+25–48: no new fire front is computed. The H+24 outline stays as a reference while wind and smoke direction advance.

ECMWF ensemble wind agreement is unavailable for this hour.

Hours with front geometry

H+1H+13H+24
100%
LighterDarker

This changes only the scenario colors. Its modeled distances and values do not change.

Filled: the low bound of the published head-rate envelope. Dashed: the high bound. For the same wind and the same dryness, accepted models differ by a factor of twenty — the gap between the two lines is the answer, not a margin around one.

The smoke wedge is a fixed-length direction cue for the selected hour. Its width follows ensemble wind spread when available; it is not a plume extent or concentration forecast.

Modeled — what it cannot see

  • Fuel is one land-cover class: load, height and continuity are unknown.
  • Relief is one local slope, held constant: no chimney effect, no valley wind.
  • No suppression: over 90 % of French wildfires are held under one hectare.

Select a fire on the map to start modeled smoke transport.

Select a fire on the map to start modeled smoke transport.

Modeled transport

This path follows coherent forecast wind at 80 m above ground. Its widening reflects resolved wind shear and turning, not smoke concentration or a health threshold.

Limits and sources

  • This is kinematic air-parcel transport only. It does not model emissions, smoke concentration, air quality, exposure, or health effects.
  • It omits injection height, atmospheric chemistry, deposition, precipitation scavenging, unresolved turbulence, convection, and terrain effects.
  • The displayed width is accumulated local sensitivity to resolved field shear and path turning. It is not a dispersion plume or a statistical confidence interval.
  • A detected active fire does not prove continuous smoke production; the source time and location must be interpreted separately.

Shade
25%

A veil between the basemap and the flight data. Trail colors run from white to red, which a full-color map competes with, so muting the background makes them easier to read — darker to push the ground back, lighter to wash it out. It never affects the data itself.

112If you see a fire, call 112 — it works right across Europe (999 in Ireland).

Return to the simple map

Position46.2000, 2.2000
Zoom5.00
Layers0

Loading — map incomplete

1

Do not zoom, pan or move the map

Every zoom or move restarts the downloads in progress. Wait for this notice to disappear to get the complete map.

Please wait before interpreting the map. These data are not complete yet:

  • Map engine