What are my NWT fire map options in 2024?

NWT Fire just relaunched its online map of Northwest Territories wildfires. Here are some options if you’re looking to track the 2024 season.

The new NWT Fire map was publicized by the territory’s wildfire agency on Friday. You can either use the redesigned website with some additional text data or a big version of the map.

NWT Fire said its new site is a “more engaging and informative experience,” but you have to know how to use the layers menu to get the most out of it.

The layers menu is the grey icon in the map’s top right-hand corner. Click that and you can add satellite hotspots (and other options, like where lightning recently struck and which fires have been declared out).

Satellite hotspot detection isn’t perfect. Sometimes, the hotspot turns out to be an error, so you can’t rely on it to be certain a new fire exists. But in a territory this vast, with so few people around to witness fires as they happen, hotspots are often the first way a fire shows up on any system before firefighters can get to an area and confirm its existence.

Firms, a Nasa-backed website, remains the gold standard in hotspot detection with some powerful features. Loading Firms will give you some basics. There’s a whole webinar you can watch if you want to learn more about its advanced features.

Returning to the NWT Fire map, text updates about fires in each region of the territory – which used to live below the old version of the map – now live in a clickable menu to the right. Slightly awkwardly, you now need to click back to the main webpage each time you want to read about another region.

Meanwhile, different fire phases – being actioned, under control, being monitored – are now represented by different symbols.

This means the old symbol for each fire, which was a flame licking up from the map, no longer appears.

Where else can I go?

Cabin Radio doesn’t have a 2024 fire map so far, though we might produce one if the need arises. We’ll update you if that happens.

Alternatives include the Edge fire map, maintained by a former Yellowknife magazine that now provides a content aggregation service.

Edge’s map demonstrates those aggregation abilities to their fullest extent, pulling in data from various services, ranging from PurpleAir air quality readings to the latest fire boundaries filed with the nation’s wildfire centre. That means you can see how much area each fire is believed to have burned.

Newly detected fires pulse a little threateningly on the map. There are easy options to turn different types of fire on and off, although at the time of writing there’s no way to add satellite hotspots to the map. (Given the ease with which Edge has already integrated a lot of data, and with NWT Fire now having added hotspots, the chances are this feature might arrive soon.)

Elsewhere, the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System – a federal service – has a range of maps and data, although they’re often not quite as straightforward to use and can be more helpful when exploring older data, for example to understand what the situation looked like in the past, change over time, or fire danger over broad areas.

There’s a map of burn area from the past 40 years, for instance, that allows you to see what burned in the NWT and when, which can help if you’re trying to understand how susceptible the land around you might be to fire. (Although as we recently learned, you can’t really trust recently burned areas the way you once could.)

To get that map, load this interactive map then use the Overlays menu in the top right to select “fire history” (one of the last options).

A range of brown shapes will load. Zoom in to the Northwest Territories and this will show you burn area from 1980 to 2021. So far, burn area from more recent years hasn’t been added. Click on any brown shape to see the year of that fire.

For smoke mapping, you can use Firesmoke or maps produced by US agency Noaa.