WildfireWatch | Live Wildfire Map

What this map shows

Explore reported wildfire incidents, perimeters and satellite hotspots across the United States. Marker age indicates when a record was updated, not fire severity. Check source timestamps before acting on a changing incident.

Layers

Record age (incident markers)

Last update: not loaded yet

Updated under 6 h

6 to 24 h

1 to 3 days

Over 3 days

No timestamp on the record

Color is how old the record is, not how big or dangerous the fire is. Each popup names the field the age came from.

Incidents in view

Incident	State	Acres	% cont.	Last update	Age (h)

Sources

Basemap: loading

All four data layers are public ArcGIS feature services published in the Esri Living Atlas from federal feeds. No account, key, or token is required, and each was queried anonymously to confirm that.

Incidents and perimeters: NIFC and IRWIN interagency records, services9.arcgis.com/.../USA_Wildfires_v1
VIIRS hotspots: NASA FIRMS 375 m detections, .../Satellite_VIIRS_Thermal_Hotspots_and_Fire_Activity
MODIS hotspots: NASA FIRMS 1 km detections, last 48 hours, .../MODIS_Thermal_v1
GOES detections: NOAA NESDIS Hazard Mapping System, filtered to GOES-East and GOES-West, services2.arcgis.com/.../NOAA_Satellite_Fire_Detections_(v1)

Basemaps: six options, all served without an account or key. USGS Imagery Topo, USGS Topo, and USGS Shaded Relief come from The National Map and are US federal public domain. NASA GIBS Blue Marble is NASA EOSDIS, public domain, and caps out at zoom 8. OpenStreetMap and OpenTopoMap are community tile servers under their own usage policies, fine for light personal use, not for heavy traffic. Map library: Leaflet 1.9.4 from cdnjs, open source under BSD-2.

Markers are drawn with plain CSS and SVG shapes. No third-party icon files are used.

Polling: incidents and GOES every 5 minutes, perimeters and VIIRS every 10, MODIS every 15, and only for layers that are switched on. Nothing is requested while the tab is in the background or the browser is offline, one request per layer at a time, with exponential backoff after a failure. No API keys, tokens, accounts, or local storage are required by the map data services. This page uses Google Analytics (GA4) for site analytics.