Wildfire Ahead

Help using Wildfire Ahead

Find current information, prepare, and understand what this service can and cannot do.

Current information

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Errors and emergencies

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Wildfire Ahead

We help agencies across Canada and the United States see wildfire risk earlier and understand it better. We do not issue alerts, and we do not decide what happens on a fire.

What is at stake

Forest, water, mountain and coast, and the communities inside them. In Canada, wildfire burned about 2.7 million hectares a year on average between 1994 and 2023, across roughly 7,000 fires a year. Lightning starts about 46% of those fires but accounts for about 83% of the area burned.

Why this is hard

A fire forecast is not a line on a map. It is a spread of possible futures, and the honest way to draw it is as a probability. National fire records disagree with one another on thresholds and geometry; a satellite that saw cloud did not observe an absence of fire; and a wind shift is a fork in the forecast.

What the platform does

Data foundation — brings decades of scattered fire records together without erasing what makes them different. It is not a complete record of every fire.
Forecast engine — runs many possible versions of a fire, not one. It does not predict what will happen.
Command support — puts geometry, trade-offs and unknowns in front of commanders faster. It does not decide, dispatch or command.
Public information — shows official information from your government, separated from our modelling. It does not issue alerts or evacuation orders.
Drone and sensing — supports agency-flown missions under their own aviation approvals. It does not fly, route or deconflict aircraft.

Where this stands

The programme advances one evidence gate at a time, and passing in one region does not authorize use in another. Several phases are deliberately gated behind evidence that does not exist yet.

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