Tap a dot to see the fire
Every fire hotspot that NASA's satellites saw over Europe in the last 24 hours, 48 hours or 7 days, with its fire power, grouped into fires, plus the burnt areas EFFIS has mapped and tomorrow's fire danger. Press Replay to watch it spread.
Every dot on this page is a real detection by a NASA satellite. Here is how to read them.
The box at the top of the Overview says how many fires the satellites saw, how many are high or bigger, where the biggest one is and which country has the most.
24 hours, 48 hours or 7 days. A longer window shows fires that have burnt out or hid under cloud on one pass. The numbers, the fire list and the replay all follow it.
A dot is one satellite detection: its colour is its age, its size is its fire power. Rings mark the biggest fires. Tap one to see its heat per pass, the wind and smoke there, the fire danger and any burnt area.
Press Replay to watch the window run, hotspot by hotspot. Type a place or tap the location button, and the page gives the distance and direction to the nearest fires.
Burnt shows the land EFFIS has mapped as burnt. Danger colours the land by tomorrow's fire weather. Copy link keeps the window, country, fire and view; csv saves the hotspots or fires.
One pixel a satellite saw much hotter than its surroundings.
By the most heat measured in one satellite pass.
Near real time, not live.
This map shows where forest fires and other strong heat sources were detected across Europe in the last 24 hours, 48 hours or 7 days. The coloured dots are active-fire hotspots picked up by the VIIRS and MODIS instruments on NASA's satellites, the red shapes are burnt areas mapped by the EU's European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), and the optional colouring of the land is the EFFIS fire-danger forecast. The page groups the hotspots into fires, ranks them by how much heat they give off, and lets you replay the window, check what is near a place, and go full screen. Everything loads in your browser from public services. There is no account and no key.
How many fires there are, how many are high or bigger, and where the biggest burns.
Hotspots within 2.5 km are one fire, graded Low to Extreme by fire power.
A slider and a play button run the last 24 hours to 7 days, a quarter hour at a time.
Type a place or use your location for the distance and direction to the nearest fire.
Wind, rain and PM2.5 smoke forecast at any fire, and the fire danger there.
The map on the whole screen with the six biggest fires on a card.
Leave the window on 24 hours. The Overview then names the number of fires, the biggest one and the country with the most fires, and the list under Fires by country ranks the countries. Tap a country to zoom in on it, and open the Fires tab for the list of fires in it, sorted by fire power, by newest or by the number of hotspots. On a phone the same lists open from the bar at the bottom of the map.
A hotspot is a satellite pixel that was much hotter than its surroundings during a pass. It says that something was burning at that spot at that time. A burnt area is the mapped outline of land that has already burnt, so it shows how much damage a fire has done. EFFIS maps areas of about 30 hectares and bigger from satellite images, and they appear a day or more after the fire. Fire danger is the forecast Fire Weather Index (FWI) of the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System, which EFFIS uses for Europe. It combines temperature, humidity, wind and rain. A high index means a fire would start and spread easily. It does not mean a fire is burning.
One large wildfire lights up dozens of satellite pixels. To turn pixels into fires, the page joins every hotspot that lies within 2.5 km of another into one fire. The class of a fire comes from the most heat measured in one satellite pass, the sum of the fire radiative power (FRP, in megawatts) of that fire's hotspots in that pass. These classes are this page's own scale for sorting, not an official rating.
| Class | Most heat in one pass |
|---|---|
| Low | under 20 MW |
| Moderate | 20 to 100 MW |
| High | 100 to 500 MW |
| Very high | 500 to 2,000 MW |
| Extreme | 2,000 MW and more |
With the seven-day window the page can also hide steady heat sources: a spot that glows on four or more days, stays inside a few hundred metres and never gets hot is most likely a factory, a gas flare or a volcano and not a wildfire. You can turn that off in the Layers tab, and you can hide doubtful detections, small ones, and day or night.
It is near real time, not a live video. The polar-orbiting satellites that carry VIIRS and MODIS each pass over a given spot in Europe about twice a day, and NASA publishes a pass about three hours after it happens. A fire that started an hour ago may not show until the next pass. The Overview shows the age of the newest hotspot, and says so when it is older than eight hours.
The slider under the map runs over the window you chose. Drag it, press Replay, or tap the chart in the Overview, and the dots, the fire list, the numbers and the headline show how the fires looked at that moment. Dots fade from pale yellow to dark red as they get older, so the front of a spreading fire is easy to see. The arrow keys move one hour, and Now or the N key brings you back. In Near you, type a place or use the location button. The page measures from there to every fire in view, names the nearest ones with a distance and a compass direction, lists burnt areas within 50 km, and shows the wind, smoke and fire danger at that spot. Your position is only used in your browser to work out distances.
Fires in Europe peak in July and August, but the season is starting earlier and lasting longer. 2025 was the EU's most destructive wildfire year on record: according to the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, 1,079,538 hectares burnt in the EU, nearly double the 2006–2024 average. Fires hit 25 of the 27 member states, and Germany, Spain, Cyprus and Slovakia each set a national record. August alone accounted for 460,585 hectares, 43% of the year's total, after a three-week heatwave. Roughly 39% of the burnt area lay in Natura 2000 protected sites.
The EU's civil-protection knowledge network states that about 95% of wildfires in Europe are caused directly or indirectly by people, through negligence such as discarded cigarettes or out-of-control burning, accidents with machinery and power lines, and arson. Lightning causes most of the rest.
There is no account and no server of mine that receives anything from you. The page, the map library and the country outlines come from this site. The font comes from Google Fonts and the page statistics from SimpleAnalytics, which uses no cookies. Your browser asks NASA GIBS for the hotspot tiles of Europe, EFFIS for burnt areas and fire danger, and the Esri or OpenStreetMap servers for the map pictures. When you open a fire or a place, its coordinates go to Open-Meteo for the weather and smoke and to Photon for its name, and the text you type in the place search goes to Photon. Those services see your address and what you ask for. Your position, if you allow it, stays in the browser and is not saved.
In your browser the page stores your choices (panel, window, satellites, filters, layers, map style, animation) under the key wf-ui, a small list of place names under wf-places, the light or dark choice under jb-theme, and the satellite tiles of days that are over in a database called wf-tiles, so a reload is fast. Clear saved data in the Layers tab removes the first three and the tiles.
This is a map of what the satellites saw, not of every fire. The fire classes are the page's own, the danger percentages are worked out from a picture, and burnt-area outlines are rough and can grow as new images come in. The services behind the map can be busy or out of reach. The page then says which one did not answer and offers to try again. It never fills the gap with made-up data.
Satellite data lags reality by hours and misses small fires. Never use this map to decide whether to evacuate. If you see a wildfire, call 112 anywhere in the EU and follow your national civil-protection service.
Follow the smoke, watch the aircraft, or look at the water. There are more tools in the full list.