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.'
Global satellite active fire and thermal anomaly detections from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), republished as cloud-native GeoParquet 2.0 that you can query in place without downloading anything.
This is a mirror. NASA LANCE FIRMS produces the data and remains the authoritative source.
One collection, detections, holding every FIRMS active fire detection from
MODIS (Terra and Aqua, 1 km, since November 2000) and VIIRS
(Suomi-NPP since January 2012, NOAA-20 since April 2018, NOAA-21 since January
2024). Coverage is global.
The data is one table, partitioned by year, so a single glob spans the whole
record from 2000 to today. Near-real-time detections are appended hourly and are
replaced by science-quality data as NASA finalizes it, roughly three to four
months behind. A quality column tells you which you are looking at.
GOES and Landsat fire products are published by FIRMS but are not mirrored here.
For column meanings, the sort order, and the traps, read AGENTS.md — it is written for machine clients but the quirks section is worth a human's time too.
CC0-1.0. NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System states that data from NASA-led missions carries no restrictions on use or redistribution. See the ESDIS data use policy.
NASA asks that you acknowledge the source, and so do we:
We acknowledge the use of data and/or imagery from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) (https://earthdata.nasa.gov/firms), part of NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS).
Every detection comes from the FIRMS area API, requested as whole-globe windows and normalized into a single schema. Nothing is interpolated, filtered, or reclassified. The columns FIRMS publishes are carried through verbatim; the only additions are a UTC timestamp, expanded satellite names, and two sort-key columns, all documented in AGENTS.md.
FIRMS also offers yearly per-country archive zips, which download far faster than
the API. This catalog does not use them. They are clipped to country
boundaries and drop offshore detections. Measured against the API for
2000-11-05, the country archive held 3 offshore (type = 3) detections where the
API returned 58, and 2,615 rows against the API's 2,670. A mirror that silently
lost every gas flare and most volcanoes would not be a mirror.
The pipeline that builds this catalog is open, and each step is a script: firms_fetch.py fetches and normalizes, firms_build.py compacts to per-year GeoParquet. See the repository README for the overview.
Query the whole record without downloading it: