Active Fires (10 min updates)

About this layer

Where satellites saw fire in the last three days, from Geoscience Australia's national hotspot service. Himawari-9 looks every ten minutes and the VIIRS and MODIS sensors add sharper fixes as they pass, so the map is a rolling three-day picture of the whole country. Heat draws as a glow rather than a pin. Colour is how recently it was seen: white-gold within the last few hours, orange within the day, ash for ground last hot days ago, so the bright edge of a fire is where it is moving now. Brightness is how much heat was measured there, added up over every pass, so a fire seen on many passes glows as strongly as a fierce one seen twice. A lone wide, soft glow is heat the satellite could only place to about two kilometres; a tight one is good to a few hundred metres, though many tight fixes merge into a wide glow too. Use the two sliders on the filter card to keep only recent or precisely placed heat, and tap a glow for when it was first and last seen, how many passes reported it and how fierce it was.

What it is for

Check the layer time period and legend. Use the responsible fire agency for current warnings and closures.

Limits

These map records are not live emergency advice. Missing or old records cannot establish that an area is safe.