Thermal sources
The red dot is not always a fire
Fire-detection satellites report heat, not flames. This map cross-checks every detection against 75,194 documented industrial and natural heat sources, grouped into 50,057 sites across 15 categories — so a steel works reads as a steel works.
What the satellites actually see
A fire-detection satellite carries an infrared radiometer. It does not see flames: it sees a pixel of ground that is hotter than the pixels around it. A blast furnace, a flare stack, a lava lake and a burning forest all produce that same signature.
NASA publishes a mask of the persistent hot spots for exactly this reason, but it is not distributable. The inventories NASA filters that mask with are open, so this map crosses the detections against those inventories itself.
When every detection of a cluster stands on a documented site, the map adds a pictogram naming it. The fire reading itself is never hidden: an industrial identification is not certain enough to erase a fire with.
The fifteen categories
Each category has its own pictogram on the map, and its own count in the catalog.
Steel plant2,529
Cement plant3,110
Petrochemical plant295
Nonferrous metal plant71
Mineral processing site3,008
Gas flare9,351
Volcano1,222
Coal-fired power plant2,460
Gas-fired power plant5,069
Oil-fired power plant2,452
Biomass power plant4,017
Geothermal power plant315
Nuclear power plant223
Solar farm39,588
Power plant1,484
Radiating right now
No collection cycle has completed yet on this server. This is not a statement that nothing is radiating — it means nothing has been looked at yet.
Questions readers ask
- What do the red dots on a fire map mean?
- Each dot is the centre of a satellite pixel where the ground was measurably hotter than its surroundings during one overpass. It marks heat, not a confirmed fire, and its position carries a few hundred metres of uncertainty.
- Why is there a permanent hot spot over a factory?
- Because the factory is genuinely hot. Blast furnaces, cement kilns, refineries and flare stacks radiate day and night, so they are detected on almost every pass. They are documented sites, and this map names them instead of leaving a permanent fire on your screen.
- What is a thermal hotspot?
- It is the general term for any pixel flagged as anomalously hot: a wildfire, but also a volcano, a gas flare, an industrial furnace, or sunlight reflected off a solar panel.
- How many industrial heat sources are catalogued here?
- {sites} documented sites, merged into {complexes} complexes because several plants often share one site, across {categories} categories from steel works to volcanoes.
What this measurement is, and is not
- Radiative power is the infrared a sensor received at the instant it passed overhead. It is not a measure of emissions, of pollution, or of any contribution to climate change — a solar farm can top the list on reflected sunlight alone.
- A source absent from this page is not a source at rest: a polar satellite passes twice a day, clouds hide the ground, and a site that was hot between two overpasses was never seen.
- The site catalog is a snapshot, rebuilt by hand. A plant that opened after the last build is missing from it, and a plant that closed is still in it.
Where the data comes from
The detections are NASA FIRMS (LANCE / EOSDIS). The sites are not NASA's data and are not ours: they come from the Smithsonian Institution for volcanoes, the World Bank with NOAA and the Colorado School of Mines for flares, the World Resources Institute for power plants, the Spatial Finance Initiative for cement, steel and petrochemicals, Global Energy Monitor for steel, and the U.S. Geological Survey for mineral sites.