How global wildfires are tracked

NASA EONET is an event feed, not a live wall of satellite fire pixels.

The question this tool answers

Wildfire is both a local emergency and a global climate signal. A single fire can close roads and force evacuations; thousands of fires can shape smoke, carbon emissions, forest loss, and public health. This dashboard asks what fire agencies and NASA's event tracker are reporting right now: how many wildfire events are open, where they are, which named incident is largest, and how today's footprint compares with remembered mega-fire seasons.

How we know

The live event layer comes from NASA's Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker, or EONET. EONET aggregates natural-hazard events reported by agencies and partners: IRWIN and InciWeb in the United States, CAL FIRE, BC Wildfire, and international sources when available. The key word is event. An EONET wildfire is a named or reported incident with a location, status, date, and often a burned-area magnitude.

That is different from NASA FIRMS, which detects thermal anomalies from satellites such as MODIS and VIIRS. FIRMS is pixel-based: millions of hot spots that can capture fire fronts, agricultural burning, industrial heat, and false positives. EONET is human-curated and event-based. It is cleaner for a reader-facing incident map, but it misses many small fires and depends heavily on agency reporting.

The choices we made

The page separates two ideas that are often confused. The map, counts, country tiles, and named largest fire are live EONET event data. The football-field counter is a scale analogy: it converts a broad annual-average global burned-area pace into something the reader can feel while time passes. It is not a live satellite burn-rate feed, and it is not calculated from EONET.

We keep the counter because hectares are hard to feel. A football field is not a scientific unit, but it is a useful reader unit. The counter is labelled as context, and the EONET footprint is shown below it so the live agency-reported snapshot remains separate from the global annual-rate analogy.

Why burned area is hard

Burned area is measured differently across systems. Some fire agencies report acres, some hectares, and some update totals only after containment. Satellites can see burn scars and active heat, but smoke, cloud, canopy, revisit timing, and sensor resolution all affect detection. A fast grass fire, a peat fire, and a crown fire in boreal forest can have very different carbon and public-health consequences even if their reported area is similar.

That is why this dashboard does not treat the EONET count as the whole truth. It is the agency-reported event layer: excellent for names, locations, and current incidents; incomplete as a comprehensive global fire census.

What this tool cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether smoke will reach your neighborhood tomorrow. Smoke forecasts need atmospheric transport models, fuel data, and local weather. It cannot replace local evacuation orders. And it cannot compare every country perfectly, because EONET coverage is strongest where agencies publish structured reports.

It also cannot distinguish all wildfire, prescribed fire, agricultural burning, and peat fire cases from one number alone. Source agencies do that classification unevenly. The dashboard labels the feed honestly and points to FIRMS, GWIS, and national agencies for deeper analysis.

Credits

This dashboard is downstream of fire crews, incident managers, satellite teams, national agencies, NASA EONET curators, and researchers who turn hot pixels into fire products. The map is a daily public-data snapshot, not an emergency product. During active fires, follow local officials and national fire agencies first.

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