The international environmental monitoring and scientific research communities have recognized the vital role environmental satellites can play in detecting and monitoring active fires. They have also stressed the importance of utilizing operational satellites to produce routine fire products and to ensure long-term stable records of fire activity for applications such as land-use/land cover change analyses and global climate change research. In September 2000, the NOAA NESDIS Office of Research and Applications and the UW-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies implemented the GOES Wildfire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm (WF_ABBA), providing half-hourly fire products in real-time for most of the Western Hemisphere. In the United States the primary real-time application of the half-hourly WF_ABBA fire product is diurnal monitoring of existing fires. Over the past 2 years, the WF_ ABBA has monitored the rapid intensification of a number of wildfires, including the Viejas fire in California, the Thirty Mile Fire in Washington, and conflagrations in Colorado and Arizona during the 2002 fire season. In Canada the Wildfire ABBA is used to detect and monitor wildfires in northerly and remote locations. In Central and South America the diurnal GOES fire product is primarily used to document burning associated with deforestation and agricultural land management. In North, Central, and South America the WF_ABBA half-hourly fire products are providing new insights into diurnal, spatial, seasonal and interannual biomass burning activity. An analysis of fire activity in the Western Hemisphere as observed with the GOES WF_ABBA from September 2000 through August of 2002 will be presented.