WarBrief Live | October 25, 2026 | Intelligence Tools
NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) was built to track wildfires, but open-source analysts now use it to spot the fires left by strikes, shelling, and burning infrastructure in war zones. It turns satellite heat detections into a public, near-real-time map of where the ground is burning: an independent check on claims made by either side.
What it does
FIRMS distributes near-real-time active fire data from two NASA instruments: MODIS aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites, and VIIRS aboard the joint NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP satellite and NOAA-20 and NOAA-21. When an instrument detects a thermal anomaly, the system plots the center of the pixel containing it: a 1-kilometer pixel for MODIS and a 375-meter pixel for VIIRS, which responds better to smaller fires and nighttime burning. Each detection carries a confidence value and a fire radiative power (FRP) figure in megawatts, reflecting radiant heat output.
Globally, FIRMS data are available within three hours of a satellite observation; for the United States and Canada, detections arrive faster. FIRMS was developed by the University of Maryland with NASA Applied Sciences and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization funding, and moved to NASA’s LANCE program in 2012. Detections can be viewed on the FIRMS fire map or NASA’s Worldview, sent as email alerts, or downloaded as SHP, KML, TXT, or WMS files.
How analysts use it
The standard conflict-monitoring workflow starts with a reported event. After a strike is claimed, an analyst queries FIRMS for the area and the time window around the most recent satellite overpass, then checks whether thermal anomalies sit on or near the reported target. High-confidence, multi-pixel detections clustered over a footprint matching the target, such as a fuel depot, count as meaningful corroboration; a single low-confidence pixel does not. Analysts also compare new detections against the pre-war baseline for the same area, since a fire routine in one place may be highly unusual in another.
This approach became routine during the war in Ukraine, where researchers combined FIRMS detections with commercial radar imagery to document damage to power plants, railway yards, and petroleum storage, and where The Economist compared observed fires against 100 baseline models trained on pre-war patterns. The same technique has been applied to strikes in Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Yemen. Analysts also use archived FIRMS data, downloadable by country or custom-drawn region, to reconstruct timelines: a sudden cluster of high-FRP detections on a single night can help date and locate footage of a burning facility. FIRMS complements other satellite tools in the analyst’s kit; optical imagery from platforms such as Sentinel Hub shows what a site looks like, while FIRMS shows when it burned. See also the WarBrief intelligence hub for related coverage.
Access and pricing
FIRMS is free to use. The global fire map, the US and Canada fire map, and the data downloads are openly available from NASA, with no subscription tier. Users who want alerts can subscribe to the FIRMS alert service, also free: an area of interest can be the whole world, a country, a protected area, or a custom region drawn on the map, with alerts in near real time or as daily or weekly summaries, plus optional CSV or KML attachments. An alert account is required for that service.
Limitations
FIRMS detects heat, not causes. A detection cannot distinguish a missile strike from an accident, an intentionally set fire, a wildfire, or an industrial heat source such as a gas flare or agricultural burning, and the data become less reliable in summer, when many things burn for ordinary reasons. Cloud cover and overpass timing also matter: a fire that starts and dies between passes may never be recorded. Resolution is another constraint: even VIIRS cannot resolve individual structures within a 375-meter pixel, so FIRMS can place a fire in a facility complex but not identify which building burned. Finally, near-real-time detections are operational products, not science-quality data, so analysts treat a hotspot as a lead to corroborate with imagery, video, and reporting, never as proof of a strike on its own.
Sources
- NASA Earthdata: Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS)
- NASA LANCE: FIRMS
- Bellingcat: Scorched Earth — Using NASA Fire Data to Monitor War Zones
- NASA FIRMS: Fire Alert Subscription
