New map on Windy: Active fires
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At Windy, we have extended our partnership with Copernicus, and I am happy to announce that we have added a new map to Windy - "Active fires".
Active fires are provided by the Copernicus Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS). Adding fire maps is an excellent addition to our current environmental maps. The active fires map represents thermal radiation measured from space-borne sensors and detected as coming from actively burning vegetation and other open fires.
It is expressed as the daily average of the fire radiative power (FRP) observations made in 125 km grid cells and expressed in the units of [mW/m2]. The rate of release of thermal radiation by a fire is believed to be related to the rate at which fuel is being consumed and smoke produced.
To open the map just select Active fires in the list of all maps. Moreover, you can open Active fires points from the list of POIs at the bottom right-hand box on any Windy map, including the last 12 hours satellite (very useful). Hovering over the fire icon gives you additional information.
The Active Fires POI layer is not available from mobile devices.
https://www.windy.com/-Active-fires-fires?fires,-31.020,152.380,7,internal
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Nice addition to the Windy suite!
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This is a marvellous addition, great job!
However, or shall I say as usual (?) this should be taken with a grain of salt. Just like Tom wrote "The rate of release of thermal radiation by a fire is believed to be related to the rate at which fuel is being consumed and smoke produced" , i. e. not always. Industrial complexes with hot gases emissions and fumes, may trigger thermal radiations large enough to be mistaken for a wild fire: take a look at the following screen snapshot as I can swear that there is no active wild fire over Madrid, Spain, or Marseille, France (where oil refineries are located) at this time, but indeed industrial complexes most probably spitting hot gases to the atmosphere.
Anyway with this warning in mind, I consider this is as a -great- addition. Hats down.
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@Phil-BTZ Thank you very much for this post. We are thinking about validation/relevancy of this layer. Yes, it seems that there are such "false positives". It should be also considered that the spatial resolution is very rough and the data is valid for the previous day - it is not real-time.
To sum it up this layer is not ideal for operational monitoring of fires in inhabited areas. There are obviously more exact and more reliable sources of information for such cases.
On the other hand, I think this layer could be useful as a general overview for some known large-scale events.
It can also be very useful for checking distant locations. The data is captured from satellites, which means that it can reveal forest fires anywhere on the planet, even in the most inaccessible places. -
@TZ "the data is valid for the previous day - it is not real-time". Hmm ...that's interesting to note and keep in mind TZ, so may I humbly suggest a kinda floating window indicating these limitations with, maybe, a time stamp about when the data has been processed?
What Windy.com is very good at is that in a single place one can find almost every environmental data he wishes to find. So when a rather strong limitation such as this one rises, it is my opinion that it should be, somehow, somewhere, clearly stated.This is just to keep the big wheel turning, keep up the good work!
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@Phil-BTZ
For each layer, you can click on the clock in the low right corner. You get the information about the data including the provider, the update interval, the resolution and the last and the next update.
The Active fires layer is not the only one that is not in « real time »
