How to Track Active Wildfires in Your Browser
You can see where the planet is burning from a browser tab, for free, in about a minute. The catch is that the first thing you see — a satellite hotspot — is not a confirmed wildfire, and treating it as one is the most common mistake people make. Here is the honest workflow, and where each step stops being reliable.
The Three-Step Workflow
Start with a satellite hotspot map
The fastest way to see where something is burning right now is a map of satellite thermal detections. Our wildfire tracker plots NASA FIRMS active-fire detections near you, filterable by time range and confidence and sortable by distance — the same FIRMS feed the agencies use, on a map you can open in a tab. It answers "is anything hot near me, and how fresh is the detection?" in one glance.
LK Forge wildfire tracker →Verify against official incident information
A hotspot tells you something was hot; it does not tell you it is a named, managed incident with a perimeter and a containment figure. For that, the US authority is the National Interagency Fire Center and its national fire-information map. If a detection near you matters, this is where you confirm whether it is a reported wildfire and what the response is.
NIFC (official incidents) → · agency siteAdd the air-quality and smoke layer
Smoke travels far beyond the fire, and it is often the part that reaches you. The EPA's AirNow Fire and Smoke Map shows current air quality and smoke plumes — a different and complementary question from "where is the fire." We do not publish air-quality data, so this is the right destination for it.
AirNow Fire and Smoke → · agency siteStep 1 is where our tool lives, and it is deliberately the fast, low-commitment layer. Steps 2 and 3 are authoritative sources we do not try to replicate — the NIFC national map for the official picture, AirNow for the smoke that reaches you. Using all three, in order, is the point.
The Signal That Comes Before the Fire
A hotspot map, by construction, only shows you fires that already exist. The more useful signal in fire season often arrives a day earlier: a Red Flag Warning, which means the weather service has judged conditions — dry fuel, low humidity, strong wind — primed for rapid fire spread. It is issued before ignition, which makes it the one part of this whole picture you can actually act on in advance.
The same logic applies to extreme-heat warnings, which often precede the conditions that make a fire dangerous. Reading the warning correctly is worth more than refreshing a map.
Mistakes Worth Skipping
Treating a satellite dot as a confirmed wildfire
This is the big one, and it is why our tracker says it in the subtitle. A FIRMS detection is a thermal anomaly — something was hot when the satellite passed over. Most are vegetation fires, but a detection can also be a gas flare, an industrial heat source or even an erupting volcano. It is a signal to verify, not a confirmed fire.
Relying on a single tool
No one source does detection, official status and air quality well. Satellite maps are fast but unverified; incident sites are authoritative but lag the first detection; air-quality maps answer a question the others do not. The workflow above is three tools precisely because collapsing them into one loses something each time.
Using tracker data to make an evacuation decision
None of this — ours included — is an emergency source. Satellite passes have gaps, detections can be hours old, and a browser map has no duty to be right about your safety. When there is a fire near you, your local emergency services and official evacuation orders are the only sources that count. Aggregated data is for awareness, not for deciding whether to leave.
Ignoring the warning before the fire
The most useful signal often arrives before anything is burning. A Red Flag Warning means conditions — dry fuel, low humidity, high wind — are primed for rapid fire spread. Reading one correctly buys you a day of preparation that a hotspot map, by definition, cannot.
Confusing detection latency with fire age
A detection timestamp is when the satellite saw the heat, not when the fire started or whether it is still burning. A fresh timestamp means a recent overpass; an older one may just mean the satellite has not passed again yet. Read the time as "last seen," not "current state."
Common Questions
Can I really track active wildfires using only a browser?
Yes, for the awareness layer. Our wildfire tracker shows NASA FIRMS active-fire detections near you on a map, filterable by time and confidence, with no app and no account. That covers "where are satellites detecting heat right now." For official incident status you add the NIFC national fire-information map, and for smoke you add the EPA's AirNow map — all in the browser. What a browser cannot replace is your local emergency service, which is the only source for safety decisions.
What is a hotspot, and is it the same as a wildfire?
A hotspot is a satellite thermal anomaly — a spot that was hotter than its surroundings when the satellite passed over. It is detected by the VIIRS instrument on the NOAA-20 satellite and delivered through NASA FIRMS. Most hotspots are vegetation fires, but a detection can also be a gas flare, an industrial source or an active volcano. So a hotspot is a signal that something was hot there, not a confirmation of a wildfire. Our tracker states this outright rather than implying every dot is a fire.
Where does the wildfire data come from?
From NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), using near-real-time active-fire detections from the VIIRS instrument aboard the NOAA-20 satellite. Our tracker plots those detections and lets you filter and sort them; it does not detect fires itself and does not run its own model. FIRMS is the same source the agencies rely on, which is why starting there and then verifying against official incident information is a sound workflow rather than a shortcut.
Should I use a wildfire tracker to decide whether to evacuate?
No. No consumer tracker, ours included, is an emergency-management source. Satellite coverage has timing gaps, detections can be hours old, and a browser map carries no duty of accuracy about your safety. Evacuation decisions belong to your local emergency services and official orders. Use a tracker to understand the broad picture and to know when to pay closer attention — then follow the authorities for anything that affects your safety.
What is a Red Flag Warning?
It is an alert from the weather service that conditions are primed for rapid wildfire spread — typically some combination of low humidity, dry fuels and strong wind. It is issued before a fire, not during one, which makes it the most actionable signal in fire season: it is the day to avoid activities that could spark ignition and to be ready. We wrote a short guide to reading one, because a hotspot map shows you fires that already exist while a Red Flag Warning tells you the ground is dangerous today.
Live NASA FIRMS fire detections near you, on a map — filter by time and confidence, sort by distance. Free, no sign-up. A hotspot is a heat signature, not a confirmed wildfire.
Open the wildfire tracker →Wildfires rarely travel alone: we also run live earthquake and volcano trackers. Here is the whole natural-hazard workflow in one place.