AURSEEAursee
About Aursee: the live fire map, explained
A live map of active fires, rebuilt every hour from three satellites. Open any fire to see where it is, how strong it burns, how long it has been going and whether that ground has burned before.
Open the live mapToday’s fires by country
What you will find
Fire alerts by email
Free. Pick a town and we email you when satellites detect fire within 30 km of it.
How it works
- Three satellites carrying the VIIRS instrument — Suomi NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 — each pass over every point on Earth about twice a day and record heat in pixels 375 m across.
- Every hour Aursee takes the last 24 hours of those detections from NASA FIRMS.
- Neighbouring detections are joined into fires, and each fire is named after the nearest town.
- Each fire gets its radiative power, the wind and weather on it, the land cover under it and how often that ground has burned since 2012, from the burn archive.
What a detection is
Heat seen from orbit at the moment of a pass, in a pixel 375 m across, about three hours before it reaches the map. Cloud, thick smoke and the hours between passes mean some fires are not seen, and a small fire can light a whole pixel. Every figure on the site carries its instrument and resolution; the method pages write out every rule. For evacuation orders, follow your local fire service.
Where the data comes from
- NASA FIRMS — VIIRS 375 m active fire detections, three platforms.
- GeoNames — town names (CC-BY 4.0).
- ESA WorldCover — land cover at 10 m, read under every detection.
- NOAA GOES — lightning.
- GRIP4 — the road network.
- Open-Meteo — wind and weather, model figures at roughly 10 km.
- Natural Earth — coastlines and borders.
How it pays for itself
Advertising, and readers who subscribe to Aursee Pro. The site is free to read. Pages are built from the feed before any ad is placed on them.
Corrections
A fire in the wrong place, a wrong town name, anything else that looks off: report it and it is reviewed by a person.
Contact
contact@aursee.org — read by a person.