Data sources
Last updated 15 August 2026
IGNYX is built on public, freely available data. This page lists every source, what it is good for, and where it falls short. We publish it because a fire officer deserves to know what is behind a number on a screen.
IGNYX does not own satellites. Every detection you see comes from a public agency's spacecraft, listed below. Where a commercial operator would sell you access to their own constellation, we make the free ones work well together and add the incident command around them.
Fire detection — polar orbiting
| Source | Resolution | Passes | Provider |
|---|---|---|---|
| VIIRS — Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21 | 375 m | ~2 each per day | NASA / NOAA |
| MODIS — Terra, Aqua | 1 km | ~2 each per day | NASA |
Delivered through NASA FIRMS. These are the workhorses: good resolution, several looks a day, free.
Note: NASA has announced the end of the Terra and Aqua missions. As MODIS retires, VIIRS carries the load.
Fire detection — geostationary
| Source | Resolution | Cadence | Provider |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meteosat-12 (MTG) | 1 km | Every 10 minutes | EUMETSAT / LSA SAF |
| Meteosat-11 (MSG) | 3 km | Every 15 minutes | EUMETSAT / LSA SAF |
Geostationary satellites sit over one spot and watch continuously. They are coarse, but they fill the hours when no polar-orbiting satellite passes overhead — which is usually the afternoon, when fires run.
They are excellent for knowing a fire exists and is still burning, and poor for measuring how big it is. A 3 km pixel covers 900 hectares. IGNYX therefore never uses geostationary pixels to calculate burnt area, and says so on screen when only coarse data is available.
Imagery, burn scars and terrain
- Sentinel-2 (ESA / Copernicus) — 10–20 m optical, for burn scar mapping and verification
- Landsat 8 / 9 (USGS / NASA) — 30 m
- OpenTopoMap, MapTiler, Mapbox, Esri, Carto — base mapping and terrain
- OpenStreetMap via Overpass and Nominatim — roads, place names, features
Weather
- Open-Meteo — forecast and current conditions
- Windy — point forecasts and wind visualisation
- Your own weather stations — where an organisation has them, local readings are better than any model and IGNYX will use them
- Manual entry — a reading taken at the fire with a handheld instrument beats everything else, and IGNYX lets you enter it
Land cover and fuel
- ESA WorldCover — 10 m global land cover
- Your own compartment maps — a forestry company's own species, age and fuel data is far better than any global product, and IGNYX accepts it
Aircraft
OpenSky Network and adsb.lol — public ADS-B position reporting. Aircraft not transmitting ADS-B do not appear.
What all of this means in practice
- Nothing thermal sees through thick cloud. A quiet map in cloudy weather means the satellites cannot see.
- Every detection is a timestamped observation. The fire has moved since. IGNYX shows the age of each one.
- Gaps in coverage are normal. Polar orbits leave hours between passes; geostationary fills those hours at lower resolution.
- Free does not mean unreliable. These are the same feeds used by national agencies worldwide. It does mean they are shared, and none carries a service guarantee.
Attribution
We are grateful to NASA, NOAA, ESA, EUMETSAT, USGS, the Copernicus programme, the OpenStreetMap contributors, Open-Meteo and the OpenSky Network for making this data public. Where a licence requires attribution it is carried in the application.
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