All sources below are public and free. NASA FIRMS requires a free MAP_KEY (no payment, no rate-limit beyond 5,000 calls / 10 min). Everything else is unauthenticated.
| Source | What it is & how often it updates | DB tables / files | On the live map |
|---|---|---|---|
| WFIGS incidents Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services — incident locations services3.arcgis.com / WFIGS Incident Locations Current ↗ | The canonical national fire-incident feed. WFIGS is hosted by NIFC (National Interagency Fire Center, Boise) and unifies IRWIN-tagged dispatches from BLM, USFS, NPS, FWS, BIA, plus state and tribal agencies into a single ArcGIS feature service. Every record is a human-confirmed wildfire incident with point geometry, size estimate, percent contained, ICS team type, GACC region, fire cause, and estimated cost-to-date. Updates as incident commanders publish IRWIN revisions. Polled every 2 min |
fires_active
fires_history
|
Active wildfires Color ramps from orange (0% contained) → amber (50%) → gray (100%); circle radius scales with acres. |
| WFIGS perimeters Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services — interagency perimeters services3.arcgis.com / WFIGS Interagency Perimeters Current ↗ |
Polygon companion feed to the WFIGS incident layer. Each row is a snapshot of a fire's outer boundary at a moment in time, keyed (irwin_id, perimeter_date). Coverage lags incident dispatch by hours to days because publication requires a GIS team to fly, walk, or satellite-trace the fire and an IMT to upload it — so only ~24% of currently-active WFIGS WF fires have a published perimeter at any given time. When a perimeter exists, the live map measures distance-to-line from the polygon edge, not the centroid.
Polled every 2 min
|
perimeters
|
Perimeters Translucent orange fill + 1.5 px outline. Used to compute perimeter-edge distance for fires that have one. |
| NASA FIRMS (NRT) Fire Information for Resource Management System — Near-Real-Time. Polar-orbiting sensors: VIIRS S-NPP / NOAA-20 / NOAA-21, MODIS Terra + Aqua. firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov / Area API ↗ |
NASA's authoritative satellite hotspot pipeline. VIIRS (375 m pixel) and MODIS (1 km) both detect thermal anomalies in the SWIR/MIR bands and report each detection's brightness temperature, fire radiative power (FRP, in MW), and a confidence flag (low/nominal/high). Each polar-orbiting sensor passes any given point on Earth roughly twice per day, so multi-sensor fusion gives ~6–8 daily looks. NRT publishes ~3 hours after overpass. We pull the CONUS bbox -130, 22, -65, 52 for all four sensors.
Polled every 5 min
|
fires_active
fires_history
|
Satellite hotspots Uniform small red dots regardless of sensor or FRP. Filtered against the industrial-source gazetteer (next row). |
| NOAA GOES Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite. GOES-19 East (75°W) and GOES-18 West (137°W). ABI-L2-FDCC fire/hot-spot product. registry.opendata.aws / noaa-goes19, noaa-goes18 ↗ |
Geostationary fire detection — the same area is observed continuously from a single fixed position. The Advanced Baseline Imager Level-2 Fire/Hot-Spot Characterization product (ABI-L2-FDCC) ships full-disk fire detections every 5 min, with FRP and area estimates. Pixel resolution is ~4 km at nadir, growing to 6–10 km at scan edges — coarser than VIIRS/MODIS but vastly faster cadence. We read the public S3 buckets noaa-goes19 and noaa-goes18 directly with no auth, no API limits. GOES-16 was retired Apr 2025; East coverage is now GOES-19.
Polled every 5 min
|
fires_active
fires_history
|
Satellite hotspots Same uniform red dot as the FIRMS feeds — visually merged into one operational layer. |
FIRMS Standard Processing
Fire Information for Resource Management System — Standard Processing variant. The same NASA pipeline that powers NRT, but with the longer-latency archival product that ships a type classifier the NRT stream lacks.
firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov / Area API (SP) ↗
|
Anti-noise gazetteer. NASA's Standard Processing pipeline classifies every detection into type=0 (vegetation), type=1 (volcano), type=2 (static industrial), or type=3 (other). The NRT stream doesn't ship the type field, but the SP archive does. We pull 6+ months of VIIRS_NOAA20_SP / VIIRS_SNPP_SP / MODIS_SP across CONUS, filter to type=1 and type=2, bin to 500 m, and require ≥3 hits across ≥2 distinct dates. Result: ~2,300 known industrial heat sources (oil flares, refineries, foundries, volcanoes) that get filtered out so we don't mistake them for wildfires.
Refresh quarterly
|
industrial_sources
|
Industrial sources (filter) Off by default. Toggle on to debug what we're hiding from the satellite layer (Coalinga, Permian, Houston refineries, Kīlauea, etc.). |
| HIFLD Transmission Lines Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data — DHS / CISA's open critical-infrastructure dataset on data.gov. catalog.data.gov / electric-power-transmission-lines ↗ |
US transmission-line geometries with voltage_kv, owner, line type, and substation endpoints (SUB_1 / SUB_2) embedded in the source's raw attribute set. Coverage is solid at ≥230 kV (the backbone) but has known gaps below 161 kV — many sub-transmission segments are missing or labeled UNKNOWNxxxxxx for endpoint substations. HIFLD's last refresh was 2022. We augment with OpenStreetMap (next row) to backfill the gaps and resolve substation names.
Static — one-time bulk load (HIFLD refreshes ~quarterly)
|
grid_lines
|
Transmission Voltage-banded color: 765 purple, 500 dark blue, 345 mid blue, 230 cyan, 115–161 steel. Voltage filter pill drops the cutoff dynamically. |
| OpenStreetMap power infrastructure Crowdsourced map data — community-mapped power=substation (nodes / ways / relations) and power=line / minor_line (ways). overpass-api.de / Overpass query API ↗ |
"Wikipedia of maps" — anyone can edit, no rate limits to read. OSM has dramatically better substation naming than HIFLD, especially at sub-transmission, and includes hydro powerhouses HIFLD often misses. We pull power=substation centroids and power=line geometries from the public Overpass endpoint, tiled across CONUS at 5°×5° = 72 tiles to stay under server-side timeouts. Used to triangulate UNKNOWNxxxxxx HIFLD endpoints by spatial proximity to a named OSM substation.
Refresh quarterly
|
substations_osm
power_lines_osm
|
Not yet on the map Substations layer planned for Step 22b — small icons with hover-name. Currently only used in the line-matching pipeline. |
| CAISO OASIS California Independent System Operator — Open Access Same-time Information System. Public transmission-outage feed. oasis.caiso.com / oasisapi ↗ |
CAISO's published transmission-outage record. The TRNS_OUTAGE queryname returns one row per OMS revision (Inserted / Updated / Deleted lifecycle, median 8 per event), with start / end timestamps, outage type, nature of work, and a substation-pair label like VACA-DIXON. 30-day window cap per request. Full TOR detail (Appendix A schema) has only ~3-day public retention — older records lose the cause-code field. Other ISOs (MISO, ERCOT, PJM, NYISO, ISONE, SPP) don't publish equivalent free outage feeds; CAISO is the only ISO with this level of public access.
Backfilled 2018–present (was a one-time pull for the historical backtest)
|
caiso_outages
caiso_line_mapping
caiso_outage_line_match
|
Not on the map Backtest data — kept for case-study reference (Caldor → MALIN-ROUND MOUNTAIN-2 derates etc.). Live overlay is a future step. |
IrwinID; we use it as the foreign key into perimeters.