NOAA’s Next Generation Fire Detection Service: Leveraging Space Assets to Provide Critical Information to Fire Managers and the Public

Wildfires are among the most destructive natural disasters, causing significant damage to ecosystems, human life, property, and air quality. As climate change intensifies, leading to rising temperatures, declining snowpack, and more frequent droughts, the severity of wildfires has escalated globally, making early detection and accurate forecasting increasingly essential.

As the nation’s leading environmental science agency, NOAA provides critical outlooks, forecasts and early warning products, monitoring temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture across the nation.

In response to this growing threat, as well as increasing data volumes and diversity of data sources, NOAA/NESDIS is collaborating with the University of Wisconsin Space Science and Engineering Center’s (SSEC) Next Generation Fire System (NGFS) to build a responsive, performant web portal providing rapid and critical access to wildfire space and ground based observations, models, warnings, and forecasts, relevant to diverse user communities including scientific researchers, weather forecasters, emergency responders, educators, policy makers, citizen scientists, and the general public.

Using scalable, distributed, cloud-based technologies, NOAA/NESDIS is embracing FAIR, CARE, and DEIA data principles to build a fire detection and data access system. By leveraging the newest generation of API specifications from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as well as distributed, cloud-optimized data formats such as GeoParquet and Cloud Optimized Geotiff (COG), we are building reusable data access services to empower NOAA’s web-based user interface as well as GIS clients and user-developed software.

In this talk, we will discuss the growing needs of the wildland fire communities and present progress towards a fully operational next generation fire detection and data access system, enabling future scientific endeavors and ultimately improving NOAA’s ability to protect lives and property.