NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) is the global standard for operational fire monitoring — and one of the few Earth observation products where the speed of delivery matters as much as the data itself.
With detections available within hours of a satellite overpass, FIRMS feeds directly into wildfire response coordination, air quality forecasting, agricultural burn tracking, and insurance damage assessment. The combination of near real-time delivery and a continuous archive stretching back to 2000 makes it both an operational tool and a research dataset for studying long-term fire regimes, deforestation patterns, and climate-driven shifts in fire activity.
What makes FIRMS particularly useful in a GIS context is that each fire detection is a geolocated point with rich attributes — brightness temperature, fire radiative power, confidence level, and acquisition time — so you can filter, aggregate, and overlay the data immediately.
Map fire detections against land cover to identify which ecosystems are burning, overlay with population and infrastructure layers for risk assessment, or aggregate by region and season to build fire frequency baselines. The point-based format also means FIRMS data loads cleanly into any GIS platform, including Atlas, without the processing overhead of raster satellite imagery.
