Through Current Situation Viewer you can access all the latest information on the current fire season in Europe and the Mediterranean area. This includes real-time fire danger weather maps and forecasts up to 6 days, daily updated maps of hot spots and fire perimeters.

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Area burnt according to own calculations based on data from the European Forest Fire Information System EFFIS data base Total burnt areas

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Active fire detection

Active fires are located based on the so-called thermal anomalies they produce. The algorithms compare the temperature of a potential fire with the temperature of the surrounding land cover; if the temperature difference is above a given threshold, the potential fire is confirmed as an active fire or 'hot spot'. EFFIS uses active fire detection provided by NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System).

MODIS Active fires

The MODIS sensor, onboard the TERRA and ACQUA satellites, identifies areas on the ground that are clearly hotter than their surroundings and marks them as active fires. The temperature difference between areas that are actively burning with respect to neighboring areas allows the identification and mapping of active fires. The spatial resolution of the MODIS active fire detection pixel is 1 km.

Additional information on the MODIS live fire product is available at https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/near-real-time/firms/c6-mcd14dl.

VIIRS Active fires

The VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) aboard the NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) uses algorithms similar to those used by MODIS to detect active fires. VIIRS Active Fire products complement MODIS active fire detection and provide improved spatial resolution compared to MODIS. The spatial resolution of the active fire detection pixel for VIIRS is 375m. In addition, VIIRS can detect smaller fires and can help delineate perimeters of large fires in progress.

Additional information on VIIRS active firefighting products can be found at https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/near-real-time/firms/viirs-i-band-active-fire-data.

Active fire mapping is performed to provide a synoptic view of current fires in Europe and as a means to assist in the subsequent mapping of burned fire perimeters. Active fire information is typically updated 6 times a day and is available in EFFIS within 2-3 hours after MODIS/VIIRS imagery acquisition.

When interpreting the hotspots shown on the map, the following should be kept in mind: The location of the hotspot on the map is only accurate within the spatial accuracy of the sensor.

Some fires may be small or obscured by smoke or clouds and go unnoticed. Satellites also detect other heat sources (not all hot spots are fires)To minimize false alarms and filter out active fires not qualified as wildfires (e.g., agricultural burns), the system only displays a filtered subset of the hot spots detected by FIRMS. For this purpose, a knowledge-based algorithm is applied that takes into account the extent of the surrounding land cover categories, the distance to urban areas and man-made surfaces, the confidence level of the access point. With the feature identification tool, key information attached to each active fire is provided, such as geographic coordinates, administrative district (commune and province) and the main affected land cover category.

Fire News

Another source for active fire identification is built through firenews: news items are selected from a large set of RSS feeds published by various wildfire related sites, and from news feeds filtered with appropriate keywords. Items from the selected feeds are geolocated and published on the EFFIS website, in the section. FireNews.