How NASA FIRMS VIIRS 375m thermal pixels at 3-hour latency become proximity-based wildfire risk scores for 40 monitored cities.
🧠 OPEN BRAIN DASHBOARD LIVEEvery three hours, NASA satellites pass overhead and scan Earth for infrared signatures of active fire. Right now, 10 wildfire hotspots are burning across the continental US—from the Newman Drive fire consuming brush in Florida's Collier County to the Schwachheim wildfire in Colorado's Las Animas region. You won't see these fires on the evening news yet. But Pandita Data's Brain Dashboard already knows they're there, thanks to NASA's FIRMS system feeding live active fire detections into our AI risk scoring engine.
The difference between early detection and late response? Hours. Maybe days. FIRMS gives us those hours.
FIRMS stands for Fire Information for Resource Management System. It ingests thermal data from two NASA instruments—MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) aboard Aqua and Terra satellites, and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 satellites. Together, they scan the planet twice daily with 375-meter resolution, identifying any surface hotter than roughly 400 Kelvin. That's hot enough to be fire.
The system flags active fire pixels globally every three hours, 24/7, with no weather delays and no human gatekeeping. A prescribed burn in Wisconsin registers the same way as a wind-driven wildfire in Mississippi. This raw, unfiltered feed is the backbone of Pandita's wildfire module.
Newman Drive Wildfire (Collier, FL) · APQ CPT 10 Rx prescribed fire (Highlands, FL) · rx-Young 1 prescribed burn (Jefferson, WI) · Schwachheim Wildfire (Las Animas, CO) · Smoke Show Wildfire (Perry, MS) + 5 other detections across the continent.
A FIRMS detection is the raw ingredient. The real intelligence comes from context. Pandita's Brain Dashboard ingests each fire pixel, cross-references it with weather (wind speed, humidity, temperature), fuel moisture indices, topography, and nearby population density. Machine learning models then score each fire's likely growth trajectory and threat radius.
A prescribed burn in rural Wisconsin gets a low risk score. The same thermal signature near a wildland-urban interface in Colorado triggers alerts to fire managers and insurance teams within minutes.
See live fire detections and risk scores in real-time: Visit panditadata.com/brain_dashboard to track active wildfires globally. For city-level risk analysis, check the Disaster Report at panditadata.com/disaster_report.
This is what 24/7 wildfire intelligence looks like—NASA's eyes in the sky, merged with AI that understands consequences.
🧠 OPEN BRAIN DASHBOARD