Active wildfire map with live smoke forecast.

Mapped wildfire perimeters

The shaded polygons are official wildfire perimeters from the National Interagency Fire Center's Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services (WFIGS) program — the same authoritative boundaries incident teams and federal agencies work from. A perimeter is drawn after a fire is flown or walked, so it is the most accurate footprint available, and it typically lags the fire's true edge by hours.

• Prescribed burns are filtered out — only true wildfires are shown
• Colour runs hot to cool by containment, not by size
• Simplified to roughly 200 m for browser performance

Active incident locations

Every active wildfire incident has a point, sized by reported acreage. Points matter because most fires never get a perimeter: a new start, a small fire, or one in country nobody has flown will appear here long before a polygon exists — and often instead of one. Each point carries the incident record, including discovery date, cause, containment, complexity tier, and assigned personnel.

HRRR-Smoke near-surface forecast

The smoke overlay is NOAA's High-Resolution Rapid Refresh Smoke model (HRRR-Smoke), showing near-surface smoke concentration — the layer people actually breathe, as opposed to the column-integrated smoke visible from satellite. It ingests VIIRS satellite fire detections and runs forward hourly, so the scrubber lets you step through where smoke is forecast to move over the coming hours.

The model runs on a 3 kilometre grid, so the smoke layer deliberately stops sharpening once you zoom past roughly the scale of a county — beyond that there is no more detail to show, and drawing crisper edges would imply a precision the forecast doesn't have. Fire perimeters and points keep their full resolution at every zoom.

• Near-surface concentration — the health-relevant field
• 3 km grid; smoothly upscaled rather than falsely sharpened
• Hourly steps, observed hours and forecast hours both included
• Forecast hours are labelled as such in the scrubber

How to read containment

Containment is the share of a fire's perimeter that crews have secured a control line around. It is not how much of the fire is out. A fire can be 60% contained and still growing hard on the uncontained flank, which is why the colour ramp here weights containment rather than acreage — a small uncontained fire in bad terrain is frequently the more urgent signal.

Burned ground stops absorbing water

Severe fire strips vegetation and can bake soils into a water-repellent layer. The same storm that a healthy watershed would have absorbed instead runs straight off a burn scar, producing debris flows, scoured channels, and sediment pulses far downstream of the fire itself. The elevated risk persists for years — typically until vegetation re-establishes — which is why post-fire watershed monitoring is a multi-season commitment rather than an incident-season one.

Sediment, ash, and temperature

Post-fire runoff carries ash, nutrients, and fine sediment into streams, spiking turbidity and depressing dissolved oxygen at exactly the wrong time of year. Losing riparian canopy raises water temperature over reaches that cold-water species depend on. For fisheries programs, a fire several ridges away can be the proximate cause of a bad season on a reach that never burned.

Smoke is a field-safety and data-quality problem

Heavy near-surface smoke closes access, cancels crew days, and puts gaps in exactly the continuous records that monitoring programs are judged on. Knowing where smoke is forecast to sit tomorrow is the difference between rescheduling a survey and losing it.

Wildfire as one input among many

Driftwise is the system of record environmental monitoring programs run on. Wildfire proximity from this same NIFC feed is one of more than a dozen federal inputs Driftwise watches on every river reach — alongside USGS stream gauges, NOAA flow and flood forecasts, EPA water-quality data, and air-quality readings. An active fire near a monitored corridor crosses that input's edge and surfaces recommended actions to the crews responsible for it.

• Fisheries & aquatic monitoring — population records and reach-level risk
• Habitat restoration & invasives — burn-scar revegetation and treatment tracking
• Waterway management — hazard and conditions monitoring with a public map

Watershed Explorer

Click any point in the country and read what six federal datasets say about it — flow, drought, fire, flood forecast, satellite cyanobacteria screening and Clean Water Act impairment — each one labelled with what it is actually a fact about.

Streamflow Map

Every reporting USGS stream gauge in the country, coloured by how today’s flow ranks against that gauge’s own record for this calendar day.

U.S. Drought Map

The U.S. Drought Monitor — the country’s official weekly drought assessment — drawn across five severity categories from D0 to D4.

Flood Outlook Map

NOAA’s river forecast centres call the next few days at every forecast gauge in the country, on the National Weather Service’s own flood categories — action, minor, moderate and major.

Impaired Waters Map

Every subwatershed in the country against the states’ own Clean Water Act assessments — what is impaired, what is still on the 303(d) list, what is causing it, and how much of the country nobody has assessed at all.

Cyanobacteria Bloom Map

NASA and EPA’s satellites read a pigment index over roughly 2,300 U.S. lakes large enough to resolve at 300 m. A pre-screening indicator, not a health assessment, and never a substitute for your state’s advisory.

Critical Habitat & Protected Waters Map

Every river and stream the federal government has designated as ESA critical habitat, the listed species each unit is designated for, and who manages the protected land around it.