Satellite (VIIRS) Thermal Hotspots and Fire Activity

This layer presents detectable thermal activity from VIIRS satellites for the last 7 days. VIIRS Thermal Hotspots and Fire Activity is a product of NASA’s Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE) Earth Observation Data, part of NASA's Earth Science Data. Consumption Best Practices: * As a service that is subject to very high usage, ensure peak performance and accessibility of your maps and apps by avoiding the use of non-cacheable relative Date/Time field filters. To accommodate filtering events by Date/Time, we suggest using the included "Age" fields that maintain the number of days or hours since a record was created or last modified, compared to the last service update. These queries fully support the ability to cache a response, allowing common query results to be efficiently provided to users in a high demand service environment. * When ingesting this service in your applications, avoid using [POST] requests whenever possible. These requests can compromise performance and scalability during periods of high usage because they too are not cacheable. Source: [NASA LANCE - VNP14IMG_NRT active fire detection - World] Scale/Resolution: 375-meter Update Frequency: Hourly (depending on source availability) using the aggregated live feed methodology Area Covered: World What can I do with this layer? This layer represents the most frequently updated and most detailed global remotely sensed wildfire information. Detection attributes include time, location, and intensity. It can be used to track the location of fires from the recent past, a few hours up to seven days behind real time. This layer also shows the location of wildfire over the past 7 days as a time-enabled service so that the progress of fires over that timeframe can be reproduced as an animation. The VIIRS thermal activity layer can be used to visualize and assess wildfires worldwide. However, it should be noted that this dataset contains many “false positives” (e.g., oil/natural gas wells or volcanoes) since the satellite will detect any large thermal signal. Fire points in this service are generally available within 3 1/4 hours after detection by a VIIRS device. LANCE estimates availability at around 3 hours after detection, and esri livefeeds check for updates every 20 minutes from LANCE. Even though these data display as point features, each point in fact represents a pixel that is >= 375 m high and wide. A point feature means somewhere in this pixel at least one "hot" spot was detected which may be a fire. VIIRS is a scanning radiometer device aboard the Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, and NOAA-21 satellites that collects imagery and radiometric measurements of the land, atmosphere, cryosphere, and oceans in several visible and infrared bands. The VIIRS Thermal Hotspots and Fire Activity layer is a livefeed from a subset of the overall VIIRS imagery, in particular from NASA's VNP14IMG_NRT active fire detection product. The source downloads are monitored automatically and retrieved from LANCE, NASA's near real time data and imagery site, every 20 minutes when updates detected. The 375-m data complements the 1-km Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Thermal Hotspots and Fire Activity layer; they both show good agreement in hotspot detection but the improved spatial resolution of the 375 m data provides a greater response over fires of relatively small areas and provides improved mapping of large fire perimeters. Attribute information * Latitude and Longitude: The center point location of the 375 m (approximately) pixel flagged as containing one or more fires/hotspots. * Satellite: Whether the detection was picked up by the Suomi NPP satellite (N) or NOAA-20 satellite (1) or NOAA-21 satellite (2). For best results, use the virtual field WhichSatellite, redefined by an arcade expression, that gives the complete satellite name. * Confidence: The detection confidence is a quality flag of the individual hotspot/active fire pixel. This value is based on a collection of intermediate algorithm quantities used in the detection process. It is intended to help users gauge the quality of individual hotspot/fire pixels. Confidence values are set to low, nominal and high. Low confidence daytime fire pixels are typically associated with areas of sun glint and lower relative temperature anomaly (<15K) in the mid-infrared channel I4. Nominal confidence pixels are those free of potential sun glint contamination during the day and marked by strong (>15K) temperature anomaly in either day or nighttime data. High confidence fire pixels are associated with day or nighttime saturated pixels. * Please note: Low confidence nighttime pixels occur only over the geographic area extending from 11 deg E to 110 deg W and 7 deg N to 55 deg S. This area describes the region of influence of the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly which can cause spurious brightness temperatures in the mid-infrared channel I4 leading to potential false positive alarms. These have been removed from the NRT data distributed by FIRMS. * FRP: Fire Radiative Power. Depicts the pixel-integrated fire radiative power in MW (MegaWatts). FRP provides information on the measured radiant heat output of detected fires. The amount of radiant heat energy liberated per unit time (the Fire Radiative Power) is thought to be related to the rate at which fuel is being consumed (Wooster et. al. (2005)). * DayNight: D = Daytime fire, N = Nighttime fire * Hours Old: Derived field that provides age of record in hours between Acquisition date/time and latest update date/time. 0 = less than 1 hour ago, 1 = less than 2 hours ago, 2 = less than 3 hours ago, and so on. Additional information can be found on the NASA FIRMS site [FAQ]. Note about near real time data: Near real time data is not checked thoroughly before it's posted on LANCE or downloaded and posted to the Living Atlas. NASA's goal is to get vital fire information to its customers within three hours of observation time. However, the data is screened by a confidence algorithm which seeks to help users gauge the quality of individual hotspot/fire points. Low confidence daytime fire pixels are typically associated with areas of sun glint and lower relative temperature anomaly (<15K) in the mid-infrared channel I4. Medium confidence pixels are those free of potential sun glint contamination during the day and marked by strong (>15K) temperature anomaly in either day or nighttime data. High confidence fire pixels are associated with day or nighttime saturated pixels. Revisions * March 9, 2026: Switched back to primary source site ‘firms’ to get around data delivery delays on alternate ‘firms2’ site. * September 10, 2025: Switched to alternate source site ‘firms2’ to get around data delivery delays on primary ‘firms’ site. * March 7, 2024: Updated to include source data from NOAA-21 Satellite. * September 15, 2022: Updated to include 'Hours_Old' field. Time series has been disabled by default, but still available. * July 5, 2022: Terms of Use updated to Esri Master License Agreement, no longer stating that a subscription is required! This layer is provided for informational purposes and is not monitored 24/7 for accuracy and currency. 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