How we track wildfires worldwide

What the dashboard shows, where the numbers come from, how current they are, and what they can’t tell you.

The short answer

Fires burn somewhere on Earth every day. Most of the land that burns each year is savanna and grassland in Africa, Australia and South America, much of it set on purpose to clear land or renew pasture; the fires that make the news are forest fires in places like Canada, the Mediterranean or Australia. This dashboard shows the fires satellites detected in the last 24 hours, how much land has burned in each country so far this year compared with 2012–2025, and what research says about fire and climate change.

How we know

Fires seen today. NASA’s FIRMS service publishes, within hours, the fires detected by the MODIS instruments on the Terra and Aqua satellites, which pass over each place about four times a day. A detection is a one-kilometre pixel where something was burning at that moment. We keep detections FIRMS rates at 30% confidence or more and place them in countries using Natural Earth borders.

Land burned this year. The Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), run by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre for the Copernicus programme and the Group on Earth Observations, maps burned land from satellite images and adds it up by country every week. For each week it also gives the average, lowest and highest for the same week in 2012 to last year, which is how we tell whether a season is unusual. The world figure is the sum of the countries.

Why both. Detections show where fire is burning now but say little about size; burned area shows how big the season is but arrives weekly. A savanna fire and a forest fire of the same size look alike in both.

How current each part is

Fires seen: the last 24 hours, downloaded every night.
Burned area: weekly; the latest week is shown in the headline.

What the dashboard can’t tell you

Satellites miss small fires and fires under thick cloud or smoke, and they cannot tell a wildfire from a farm burn or a planned burn. Burned-area mapping misses small burns and can lag big ones by a few days.

It is not a warning service. For a fire near you, follow your national fire agency and local officials.

The world total adds up countries, so fires at sea or on very small islands are not in it.

Credits

Fire detections from NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), part of NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System; burned area from the Global Wildfire Information System, Copernicus Emergency Management Service and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre; country borders from Natural Earth. We only download and present their public data.