Active Wildfire Perimeters, United States (Current)

The 208 active US wildfires whose perimeter has been mapped. Circles and shapes are coloured by containment, not size — a 128,000-acre fire at 7% contained and a 107,000-acre fire fully contained are the same size and not the same news. A fire gets a point in this system as soon as it is reported and a mapped perimeter only once someone has flown or walked its edge, so the incident layer is complete and imprecise (552) while the perimeter layer is precise and partial (208). A map built from perimeters alone omits two thirds of what is burning. Neither is a census of fire: both carry incidents that reach the national interagency system, generally where state or federal resources were dispatched, so a fire handled entirely by a county volunteer department may appear in neither. Source: NIFC / WFIGS, the National Interagency Fire Center's current-year operational feed. This is a snapshot; the underlying service updates constantly.

• wildfire
• fire
• emergency
• nifc
• national
• open data