Looking for info on a wildland fire?

Revised on July 5, 2023

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The intent of this page to offer a few resources for those of you who might be interested in finding information about a specific wildland fire. Or perhaps you are interested in looking for information about wildland fires burning in a specific region in the U.S. This is not going to be all inclusive list, and I suspect that some of you are already familiar with these sources. If you are looking for information about a particular wildfire or perhaps information on wildfires that may be burning in your State or Region, and don't quite know where to start, than some of the links on this page may get you started. In addition to what I include here, don't forget to check with your local media outlets. I have a short international section on this page.

Large Fires on Federal Lands

InciWeb Incident Information System: Status of active fires, includes resources deployed, fire size, maps, photographs, community meetings, etc. If you are hearing about a major fire on U.S. federal lands, chances are that you will find information on InciWeb. If you are hearing about a major wildfire that is burning on U.S. federal lands, you might find info on InciWeb. I should warn you that this site can be a little slow at times.

Current Large Incidents: includes links for satellite imagery, GIS data, google earth data and fire detection maps.

National Geographic Area Coordination Center Website Portal

The U.S. is broken down into several Geographic Area Coordination Centers (includes clickable map). You can find the region of the country by clicking on the map. The GACC's will post a morning briefing each weekday morning during their fire season and may have some sort of incident report showing major fires in their region. If a wildfire is not reported on the InciWeb page, you might find information about the fire on the appropriate GACC page. Other information is not available to the public, but you may want to poke around a GACC of interest to see what they have. 

Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group has a glossary of wildfire terminology that may be found here.

U.S. State level Wildland Fire Agencies

Unforuntately, I do not know of a website for one-stop shopping for links to fire fighting agencies in the 50 States, the site that I used to refer people to is no longer functioning. Here are links to some State Agencies where there have been major wildfires in recent years, that I may have referred to in my blog: North Carolina, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, and Texas, to name a few. I am personally interested in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  I have written about Alaska and Florida and check in on those two state agencies from time to time. Finally, CAL FIRE is the California State agency responsible for fighting wildfires in California. Most if not all State forest fire agencies have a social media presence, I will let you find these sites on your own if you are so inclined.

Some International sites

Canada

• Canadian Interagency Fire Centre (current and archived situation reports, links to provincial agencies, articles and reports)
• Canadian Wildland Fire Information (fire weather, fire behavior, fire hotspots and an interactive map)

Australia

Here are links to bushfire information for some of the States/Territories/Regions in Australia. The links that I had for one or two States/Territories are dead links so I removed them.
Country Fire Authority, Victoria
South Australian Country Fire Authority
New South Wales Rural Fire Authority
ACT Emergency Services Agency, Bushfires
Fire and Emergency Services Authority of Western Australia 
Queensland Rural Fire Service
Tasmania Fire Service

When looking at another country, such as Australia, I like to have an in-country based media outlet that is freely available that I can look at. One that I have used in the past is the Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Africa 
Kwazulu Natal Fire Protection Agency (covers a portion of South Africa).

A couple of other sources for current wildfire information

Wildfire Today reports on major fires and other news of interest to those interested in wildfires and aerial wild land firefighting with a sister site called Fire Aviation. Both sites were started by Bill Gabbert many years ago. Bill passed in January 2023. Both sites are now published by the International Association of Wildland Fire.

Mike Archer (also a copywriter) has been doing a five-day a week newsletter called Wildfire News of the Day (WNOTD) for several years now. He pulls together media and other articles on that days wildfire news, listed by US State as well as by country globally. I have subscribed to Mike's newsletter for at least twelve years and find it an invaluable resource. I save his WNOTD newsletters and often scroll through old editions for a specific time period looking for articles. You have to subscribe to the WNOTD newsletter which you may do so from this page on Mike's Copywriting website.

Aerial Fire Magazine publishes their magazine six times a year, I have been a print subscriber for a couple of years. There is some freely available content on their website.