A few wildfire monitoring and satellite image sites (Sept 12, 2020)

People keep asking me:

Dan, what’s the best site to monitor the fires in California? Or a variation on that: What’s the best site to get satellite images of fires in the West?

Without going into all the detail, here’s my list of favorite sites, and a brief explanation about what each has that’s special.

1. Zoom.earth – excellent near-real-time imagery – they also have a Fire Spots layer that you can turn on/off. They also update their images very frequently. I like to click through hour-by-hour to see a time-lapse of the conditions.

Zoom.earth

2. NASA Worldview daily summary images, with many overlays of data. If you’re an advanced satellite image user, this is the place to go to get different spectral views. These can be immensely useful.

NASA Worldview

3. ARCGIS fire mappers With live wind and fire perimeter updates. Coverage: US and Canada.

ARCGIS Firemapper

4. San Diego Supercomputer Center / NSF firemap. Another great map with many (and different!) layers that you can turn on/off. Use the layer selector widget in the upper right corner of the map. (Here I’ve turned on the fire perimeter map, but if you turn on the “housing density” layer, you can see part of the wildland/urban interface problem.)

SDSC & NSF firemap

5. National Wildfire Coordinating Group Good maps showing final extent of fires using Public NIFS perimeters (which seem to be from ARCGIS). Clicking on a fire shows a LOT of data about the fire: name, acreage, %-contained, fire management group assigned, total personnel on the fire, land ownership, etc.