Since August of 2000 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) have been used to detect and monitor biomass burning in the Western Hemisphere on a half-hourly basis using the Wildfire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm (WF_ABBA). The WF_ABBA was developed at the UW-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) to automatically identify and report biomass burning associated with deforestation, agricultural management, and wildfires. The WF_ABBA processing system typically provides data within 45 minutes to an hour of the nominal GOES scan time, though the actual processing time is much shorter. Improvements to the system aim to reduce the average latency to the shortest time possible for hazard applications. Case studies of fires in the United States and Canada have shown that the WF_ABBA algorithm can detect fires close to or, in some cases, before the times at which they were reported. The temporal resolution of the WF_ABBA has also proven its utility in detecting short-lived agricultural fires that are typically missed by polar orbiting satellites. Over the next two years the WF_ABBA will be adapted to provide global diurnal fire products as more satellites with the appropriate sensors come online.