This view of global wildfires today uses satellite detections placed at their real latitude and longitude. There are no countries, coastlines or borders. Instead, the pattern of fires gradually reveals the geography beneath them.

The view updates through the day as new satellite observations arrive.

The global wildfires today view is built from active fire and thermal anomaly detections recorded by the VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite and reported through NASA FIRMS. VIIRS active-fire data has a nominal spatial resolution of 375 metres. A detection identifies the centre of a satellite pixel containing one or more heat sources, not the precise position, size or boundary of an individual fire.

The visual preserves the latitude and longitude of every detection while removing conventional geography. In each hemisphere, the pole sits at the centre and the equator forms the outer edge. Longitude determines the direction around the circle and latitude determines the distance from the pole.

Not every detection is necessarily a wildfire. Satellite thermal anomalies can also include agricultural burning, volcanic activity, gas flares and other intense heat sources. Cloud cover, smoke and the timing of satellite overpasses can also prevent fires from being detected.

Humanity in Numbers checks the NASA FIRMS feed approximately every ten minutes and stores new detections as they arrive. The archive therefore represents HIN’s accumulating record from when collection began, rather than the complete historical FIRMS archive. The current collector requests the VIIRS Suomi NPP near-real-time feed only.