Official Wildfires vs Satellite Hotspots

Official wildfire records describe managed incidents

FireRadar's default official layer uses public incident records from the provincial or territorial authority responsible for wildfire management where a confirmed direct feed is available. These records can include a fire number, operational status, reported size, cause, source timestamps, and perimeter availability when the authority publishes those fields.

• Official records are the primary FireRadar source for incident status and direct-official counts.
• Status wording and available fields vary by province and territory.
• Official records can still be delayed, incomplete, or revised, so emergency decisions should always follow the responsible authority.

Satellite hotspots are thermal detections, not confirmed incidents

The NASA FIRMS hotspot layer shows recent satellite-detected heat signals. A hotspot can provide useful context about thermal activity, especially in remote areas, but a point is not automatically a new wildfire, a mapped fire perimeter, or an official incident record.

• Several hotspot points may represent repeated observations of one fire during different satellite passes.
• One official wildfire can overlap many hotspot detections.
• A thermal detection can occasionally come from another heat source or be affected by cloud, smoke, sensor coverage, and source filtering.

Do not add hotspot counts to official wildfire counts

Official incidents and satellite detections measure different things. Adding them together would create a misleading total because multiple hotspots can correspond to one official fire, the same incident can be observed repeatedly, and some hotspots may not correspond to a confirmed wildfire at all. FireRadar keeps the datasets separate by design.

Use each layer for the question it can answer

Use official incident records when you need a named or numbered fire, its published operational status, reported size, source updates, or official perimeter context. Use satellite hotspots when you want recent thermal-detection context that may reveal heat activity beyond the currently visible official incident markers. Neither layer is a substitute for evacuation orders, alerts, road information, or local emergency instructions.

Why a hotspot can appear without an official marker

A hotspot can be detected before an incident is published, outside a connected direct-feed jurisdiction, during a gap in source availability, or because the heat signal does not become a confirmed wildfire incident. The absence of an official marker should not be interpreted as proof that a hotspot is a wildfire, and the absence of a hotspot should not be interpreted as proof that no wildfire exists.