Satellite fire detections from NASA FIRMS, fire-weather alerts from the National Weather Service, and air quality from EPA AirNow — refreshed continuously and read against the historical baseline. This is observation, not incident command: the platform deliberately does not track fire response, dispatch, or containment operations. For what has burned and where fire belongs in the record, the atlas's history layers are the authority.
The live detections come from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) — the same near-real-time satellite feed used by fire agencies worldwide. Here is exactly what it is, what we pull, and how it reaches the map above.
Polar-orbiting satellites carry instruments that read thermal infrared radiation. When a pixel on the ground is markedly hotter than its surroundings, the algorithm flags it as a likely active fire or "thermal anomaly." FIRMS distributes those detections within roughly three hours of the satellite overpass.
Each detection is a point — the center of a pixel where heat was sensed — not a fire perimeter. A single large fire produces many adjacent detections; a hot roof or flare can produce a false one. That's why the platform labels them detections, not confirmed fires.
The scale will not catch every burn. At 375 m resolution, small or short-lived fires can fall below the detection threshold, burn between satellite overpasses, or hide under cloud. An absence of detections is not an absence of fire — this feed complements ground reporting; it does not replace it.
The FIRMS area API, returning every VIIRS detection inside the Hawaiʻi bounding box for the last day.
Every point the map plots carries these attributes straight from FIRMS — the same values shown in the dossier when you click a live detection:
Fire radiative power (FRP) estimates the rate of radiant heat output — a rough proxy for fire intensity. A higher FRP means a more energetic burn at that pixel.
The platform never calls FIRMS from your browser. A Supabase edge function fetches it server-side because the
FIRMS MAP_KEY must stay secret and the service is rate-limited. Responses are cached so many users
share one fetch, and the raw CSV is normalized into GeoJSON before it ever reaches you.
Alongside FIRMS, the same function pulls active fire-weather alerts from the National Weather Service
(api.weather.gov), filtering for red-flag warnings, fire-weather watches, and high-wind events — so
the live picture combines where heat is detected now with where conditions favor ignition and spread.