Reading a live wildfire map

The detections

Every point is an active fire

Each marker is a reported active fire incident — the raw "where." Zoomed out, the clusters trace the season: the interior West, the northern Rockies, and whatever's flared up in the last refresh.

Points tell you a fire exists and roughly where. They don't tell you how big — that's the next layer.

The footprint

Points become perimeters

Fire perimeters are the mapped outline of what has actually burned. A single point can hide a hundred-acre spot fire or a hundred-thousand-acre megafire — the perimeter is what separates the two.

Together, points and perimeters answer where and how big.

The reach

Smoke goes where fire can't

NOAA's satellite smoke detection maps the plume — the part of a fire that reaches people hundreds of miles from any flame. A fire in Idaho becomes a hazy afternoon in Chicago.

This is why a fire map is never just about the fire line.

The air

From smoke to a health signal

The EPA's AirNow Air Quality Index turns that smoke into something actionable. Where the categories climb from yellow into orange, red, and purple, the air has moved from a nuisance to a genuine health risk.

The exposure

Who's under the smoke

Air quality only matters in proportion to the people breathing it. Laying county population density beneath the AQI turns "bad air" into "bad air over a million people."

A deep-red plume over empty rangeland and the same plume over a metro area are very different emergencies — the map lets you tell them apart.

The ground

Whose land is burning

Much of the West's fire burns on public land — national forests, national parks, and designated wilderness. That ownership decides who responds, what's at stake, and where fire is even allowed to run its course.

Overlaying the federal and wilderness boundaries on the perimeters reframes each fire as a management question, not just a hazard.

The border

Fire ignores the line

Canada's active wildfires sit on the same map for a reason: their smoke routinely drifts south across the border, and some of the worst air-quality days in the eastern US begin as fires far to the north.

A continental problem needs a continental view.

The whole picture

All feeds, at once

Detections, perimeters, smoke, and air quality together — the full situational picture the individual layers were building toward. Every element here is a live feed, refreshing on its own schedule.

Open the map to explore it interactively: click any fire for its details, toggle layers, and zoom to your own region.