Cloud-native Mirror (GeoParquet & PMTiles, organized with Portolan) of NASA FIRMS:
'The Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) distributes Near Real-Time (NRT) active fire data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua and Terra satellites, and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard S-NPP, NOAA 20 and NOAA 21 (formally known as JPSS-1 and JPSS-2). Globally these data are available within 3 hours of satellite observation, but for the US and Canada active fire detections are available in real-time.'
Guidance for AI agents and automated clients working with this catalog.
One rule survives every edit to this file. Every claim here is either quoted from a source or measured from the data. If you cannot point at where a fact came from, it does not belong in this file.
One collection. Public root:
https://data.source.coop/portolan-mirrors/firms-catalog/catalog.json
This is a mirror. NASA LANCE FIRMS produces the data and is the authoritative source.
The column meanings, the partition layout, the sort order, the traps, and
worked queries all live in the collection guide:
detections/AGENTS.md. Read it before writing a query.
The three traps that most often produce a confident wrong answer:
confidence is encoded differently per instrument and is not comparable.type is NULL for every near-real-time row.acq_date alone does not prune the partition. Filter on year.The catalog holds one collection, so nothing joins across collections. FIRMS
publishes no per-detection identifier; a detection is identified only by
(sensor, acq_datetime, geometry).
Assets and structural links resolve relative to the object that carries them.