Active Fires As Observed by VIIRS, 2022-Present (UPDATES RESUMED 9/12/2024)

  • Released Friday, March 1, 2024

NOTICE: As of September 12 2024, Updates to this visualization have been resumed.


This visualization shows active fires as observed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, or VIIRS, since the beginning of 2022. The VIIRS instrument flies on the Joint Polar Satellite System’s Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20 polar-orbiting satellites. Instruments on polar orbiting satellites typically observe a wildfire at a given location a few times a day as they orbit the Earth from pole to pole. VIIRS detects hot spots at a resolution of 375 meters per pixel, which means it can detect smaller, lower temperature fires than other fire-observing satellites. Its observations are about three times more detailed than those from the MODIS instrument, for example. VIIRS also provides nighttime fire detection capabilities through its Day-Night Band, which can measure low-intensity visible light emitted by small and fledgling fires. This visualization uses data from the Suomi-NPP VIIRS instrument, a partnership between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and is updated daily.

Equirectangular version, suitable for mapping to a sphere. No dates or colorbar.



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Release date

This page was originally published on Friday, March 1, 2024.
This page was last updated on Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 8:39 PM EDT.


Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.