Northern and Central Africa VIIRS Active Fire Detections

Near-real-time active fire and thermal anomaly detections covering Northern and Central Africa, derived from NASA's VIIRS sensor family. The data is provided by NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) and is continuously updated, typically within 3 hours of satellite acquisition. Files are available in SHP, KML, and CSV formats for time windows of the last 24 hours, 48 hours, and 7 days.

Use Cases

• Monitor wildfire outbreaks in near-real-time based on thermal anomaly detections.
• Analyze spatial patterns of active fires across Northern and Central Africa.
• Model fire risk and land cover changes using time-series fire detection data.
• Generate alerts for resource management based on the last 24-hour fire data.

Strengths

• Data is updated within approximately 3 hours of satellite acquisition, enabling near-real-time analysis.
• Covers a long temporal range with data from Suomi-NPP since 2011, NOAA-20 since 2017, and NOAA-21 since 2022.
• Provides data in multiple geospatial formats (SHP, KML, CSV) for flexibility.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.

Provenance

Source

NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS)

Collection Method

Derived from the VIIRS sensor family aboard Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20, and NOAA-21 satellites.

Time Range

Suomi-NPP data since 2011, NOAA-20 since 2017, NOAA-21 since 2022; with rolling windows of last 24h, 48h, 7d.

Freshness

Continuously updated, typically within 3 hours of acquisition.

Geography

Northern and Central Africa