Platform briefing
What Wildfire Ahead is, and how it works
A plain-language briefing on the platform: what problem it solves, how information moves through it, who uses it, and what it deliberately leaves to the responsible authority.
What it is
When a wildfire starts, nobody has the whole picture. A satellite sees a hot patch of ground. A camera on a ridge sees smoke. Somebody phones it in. A weather service says the wind turns this afternoon. Each holds one piece, in its own format, with its own idea of how certain it is. Wildfire Ahead brings those pieces together and works out what they mean as a whole.
- It is not another fire map. It is the layer underneath one: it gathers what every source is saying about the same fire and reconciles it.
- It shows its working. Every figure can be opened to see what went into it, where each input came from, how old it is and what disagreed.
- It decides nothing. It does not issue alerts, order resources, direct evacuation or operate aircraft. Those belong to the responsible authority.
- It works across the whole season: aiming prevention work beforehand, supporting people during an incident, and keeping a durable record afterwards.
How it works, in five steps
Everything the platform does fits into this shape.
- Collect — The platform reaches 46 registered public feeds across fifteen agencies in Canada and the United States — satellite detections, weather, fuels and terrain, drought, lightning and official fire records — each on its own schedule.
- Check — Everything that arrives is kept exactly as it came and checked in isolation before anything else can use it. The original is never edited, so what was actually received can always be recovered.
- Compare — Agencies use the same words to mean different things. The platform converts them onto common ground, records what each conversion loses, and works out which records describe the same fire — without merging them.
- Work out — Models estimate how likely a detection is to be a real fire, how it might grow and what it could reach — always with a range rather than a single number, and with a refusal to answer where conditions fall outside what was tested.
- Show — The result reaches people: a ranked list of what to look at first, a shared picture for the people working the incident, and, once an authorised person approves it, a public record with the location generalised.
Who uses it
Fire agencies and coordination centres; utilities, forestry, mining, railways, municipalities and others who own assets a fire could reach; researchers who need the underlying evidence; and the public, through a separate surface that carries only released information.
What it does not do
This briefing explains the platform. It carries no live fire, smoke or evacuation information, and it is not an alerting service. Official alerts, evacuation orders and emergency instructions come only from your responsible public authority.
Go to current official information
Explore it interactively
The same material is available as two interactive briefings. Everything they contain is on this page in text form.
- The platform briefing — Seven parts, with a plain-language and a technical reading level, and a path for each audience.
- The data journey — A guided three-dimensional walkthrough following one satellite detection through all fourteen steps.