About Live Wildfire Map

What this site is

Live Wildfire Map is an independent, free wildfire tracker. It plots every active U.S. wildfire on an interactive satellite map — size in acres, percent contained, official perimeters, current smoke, an hourly smoke forecast, and surface wind — and refreshes itself automatically. There are no accounts, no paywalls, and no app to install.

It is not an emergency service. It exists for situational awareness. For evacuation decisions, always rely on your county emergency management, local fire agencies, and official alerts.

Data & methodology

Everything on the map comes from public, authoritative feeds, loaded directly in your browser:

Fire locations, size & containment — the National Interagency Fire Center’s WFIGS live incident feed, the same interagency system used across federal and state fire management.

Fire perimeters — NIFC WFIGS interagency perimeter mapping.

Current smoke — NOAA Hazard Mapping System satellite smoke analysis.

Smoke forecast — NOAA’s HRRR-Smoke model (hourly, ~48 hours ahead).

Wind — Open-Meteo 10 m surface wind.

Location search — OpenStreetMap Nominatim geocoding (© OpenStreetMap contributors).

Imagery — Esri World Imagery.

The interactive map re-pulls live data about every 5 minutes while open. These summary pages are regenerated twice daily and additionally refresh their headline numbers in your browser on each visit.

Known limitations — read this

Official incident reporting always lags the fire itself: a fast-moving fire can be miles beyond its last mapped perimeter, and newly ignited fires may take hours to appear in the feed. Acreage and containment are updated by incident teams on their own schedules. Smoke forecasts are model output, not measurements. If what you see outside your window disagrees with this map, trust your eyes and your local authorities.

Privacy

This site has no accounts, sets no tracking cookies, and runs no ad or analytics trackers. If you use “find wildfires near me”, your location is read by your browser, used on your device to sort fires by distance, and never stored or transmitted to us. Data requests go directly from your browser to the public services listed above (NIFC, NOAA, Esri, Open-Meteo, OpenStreetMap, Google Fonts), which see your IP address as with any website you visit.

Contact & corrections

Spotted something wrong? Fire data issues (size, containment, location) originate in the official NIFC feed and are corrected there by incident teams. For problems with the site itself — a broken feature, a data mismatch, or a suggestion — email hello@livewildfiremap.com.