BC Wildfire Service containment status, in their own colours. A Fire of Note is one BCWS has flagged as highly visible or threatening a community — a designation, not a containment state, so it is a ring rather than a colour.
When each layer last got an answer out of its source. Past 45 minutes it is marked stale, here and on its button.
The Wildfires button draws both, because each is what the other is missing: hotspots are satellite detections, not mapped fires — one point is a hot pixel on one pass, hours old at most — and a perimeter is where the fire had reached when someone last mapped it. Perimeters and evacuation orders are the official record.
Solid outlines are BC's official mapping, coloured by the status above. Dashed purple outlines are national satellite-derived perimeters from CWFIS: they cover ground BC's service doesn't, and carry no status of their own.
Fire status is always an outline. Amber and green fills are something else — an evacuation alert, an area restriction.
A fire's name on a red plate marks the ones the province has designated Fires of Note, plus any fire the news feed is actively covering. It sits in the middle of the mapped perimeter, and stays at the edge of the screen while you are inside that fire. The ring is something else: BCWS's reported point for the incident — labelled Origin when you are zoomed in far enough for the two to be told apart. Tapping either opens that fire's card.
Every other fire is named too, from zoom 9.5, on a smaller chip that matches the map rather than opposing it — its name in the fire's status colour, no red ground. Zoomed out, the red plates answer "which of these is the one in the news"; zoomed in, every fire on the screen tells you what it is called, and which of the two it is stays legible at a glance.
Which sensors the timelapse draws. VIIRS is the sharper at 375 m and is on by default; MODIS sees the same fires at 1 km and reaches back further. The last one on cannot be switched off.
A ? where heat has come back over several satellite passes, growing, with nothing reported to explain it. Mostly ground BC Wildfire doesn't cover — Washington, Alberta, a national park. When one turns out to be a real reported fire the badge fills in and names it, and the hollow ones are the questions still open.
Every mark on the map is PurpleAir, on the US AQI scale (0–500, EPA-corrected). One scale, so two marks can always be compared.
They are drawn blended: units close enough together to be answering the same question are read as one measurement and drawn as a soft field over the ground they cover. A unit that disagrees with its neighbours by more than their scatter allows is left out of the average — tap any mark to see which went in, which were set aside, and what each was reading. Zoom in and the groups break back into individual sensors.
Government AQHI stations are read but not drawn. AQHI is a health-risk index over three pollutants on a 1–10+ scale, so a station's 3 and a group's 140 are not two readings of one thing — printed side by side as numbered discs they invited exactly that comparison. What the stations do instead is put a ceiling on the marks near them: AQHI cannot be averaged in, but it does limit how much PM2.5 can be in the air, so consumer units claiming worse are pulled part of the way down towards it and where they agree nothing moves. The correction only ever runs downwards, and any mark it touched says so when tapped.
The ☰ on the Air quality pill opens a timeline — the same hours the smoke forecast plays, because it is the same model run, so moving one moves the other. Scrubbed ahead of the mark on its track, which is the present hour, each reading is carried forward on the forecast plume. Those marks lose their colour — a projection goes grey where a measurement stays saturated — and say so when tapped. The station ceiling is dropped there too: it is a fact about this hour, and holding an incoming plume down to it would be the correction working against the forecast. Now puts the map back on the present.
Canadian Lightning Detection Network (ECCC), published every ten minutes. Tap anything for when it struck.
The one layer here that has not happened yet. ECCC's FireWork model takes the day's detected fires, estimates what each is putting into the air, and predicts where it goes hour by hour for three days. Play it from the timeline at the foot of the map. What is drawn is the model's total PM2.5, so it includes the ordinary background haze of towns and traffic — but during a smoke event the fires are nearly all of it.
Drawn under everything else at 10 km — a wash that says which valleys fill in, not what any address will be breathing. Where it disagrees with the measured air quality marks, the measurements are what is true.
The ramp fades as well as colours: the model has a number for every square of the continent and most of them are clean air, so each pixel takes an opacity to match its own reading rather than laying a sheet of grey over three provinces.
Barred white and red is a closed road; amber is a major delay that is still passable. Faded means scheduled, not yet in effect. Ground shaded green is a BC Wildfire Service area restriction — a closure of the land itself, which you may not enter. Always confirm on DriveBC before travelling.
The cube button under the basemap and theme toggles switches the map from shaded relief to a terrain mesh you can tilt into — drag with the right mouse button, or with two fingers on a phone.
The vertical is exaggerated, and not to one scale: the ground is drawn about 1.4× its real height, and height above the ground about 4× — enough that a storm reads as being above the valley rather than lying on it. Fires, smoke and the hotspot glow stay on the ground where they are measured. Lightning is the exception: the glow is lifted to a typical thunderstorm cloud base, which is where the storm is, not where its strikes landed — for that, read the sparks and the strike cells on the ground.
Aggregated automatically from official feeds, news outlets, YouTube and Bluesky. Stories that fall inside the area you are looking at are marked in the list. May be delayed or mis-located — confirm with official sources.
Hotspots NASA FIRMS · perimeters, evacuation orders and restrictions BC Wildfire Service · national perimeters CWFIS · AQHI ECCC · lightning Canadian Lightning Detection Network (ECCC) · smoke forecast FireWork via MSC GeoMet · sensor data from PurpleAir · wind Open-Meteo · road closures and highway cameras DriveBC (BC Ministry of Transportation and Transit) · elevation Terrain Tiles on AWS · landmark names Canadian Geographical Names Database (NRCan) · recreation sites, trailheads and ski areas BC Data Catalogue · backcountry huts © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL · imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics · vector basemaps © CARTO, © OpenStreetMap contributors.
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