Apps & Tools

Fire Tracker App for Chrome: How to Set Up US Wildfire Tracker Alerts in Five Minutes

📅 September 2026 ⏱ 54 min read ✍ US Wildfire Tracker team

The US Wildfire Tracker fire tracker app is a free Chrome extension that opens a live wildfire map in the browser side panel or a full tab. This manual covers installing it, pinning it, granting location, reading probability tiers and timestamps, and fixing the three faults people hit most.

What is the fire tracker app for Chrome?

US Wildfire Tracker is a free chrome fire tracker extension, listed in the Chrome Web Store as Fire Tracker, that renders a live United States wildfire map inside the browser. It fuses official National Interagency Fire Center incident records, NASA satellite heat detections, NOAA geostationary heat and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts into one view.

The extension is not a separate program. It loads the same map that runs at wildfire-map.org, but it puts that map in a panel docked beside whatever you are already reading, so checking fire activity costs one click rather than a tab switch and a bookmark hunt.

Nothing about this fire tracker app requires an account. There is no sign-in wall, no paid tier, no advertising and no third-party ad trackers inside it. The Chrome Web Store listing carries a 5-star rating.

The four data feeds behind the map

Four public feeds sit underneath every marker in the fire tracker extension. Official incident records and perimeters come from NIFC and the Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services (WFIGS) program. Thermal detections come from NASA's MODIS and VIIRS instruments. Geostationary heat comes from NOAA's Hazard Mapping System, which reads the GOES satellites.

The fourth feed is the National Weather Service alert service at api.weather.gov, which publishes Red Flag Warnings and Fire Weather Watches as machine-readable polygons. Our pillar guide on how a fire tracker assembles these four layers explains the plumbing in detail; this article stays on the controls you actually touch.

What the extension is not

US Wildfire Tracker is not an official emergency service and issues no evacuation orders. Evacuation authority in the United States sits with county sheriffs, fire chiefs and state emergency management agencies. When an official order conflicts with anything on the map, the order wins every time.

The map is also not a fire-behavior model. It shows what agencies and satellites have already observed, not where a fire will be in three hours. Prediction of that kind is done by incident meteorologists and fire-behavior analysts assigned to an incident management team.

Where the extension fits in a normal day

Most people who install an app to track fires do not want to stare at a map. They want a glanceable answer to one question: is anything burning near a place I care about? The side panel is built for that pattern, because it stays open across tab switches when configured to do so.

During the 2026 season that question had real weight. NIFC reported 53,802 fires and more than 8.4 million acres nationwide by September 9, 2026, with 59 large fires burning and 14,405 firefighters and support personnel assigned.

How do you install the fire tracker app?

Installing the US Wildfire Tracker fire tracker extension takes about 60 seconds: open the Chrome Web Store listing, select Add to Chrome, approve the permission dialog with Add extension, then open the panel from the toolbar. Google's own documentation describes exactly this three-step flow for every extension.

You cannot add extensions while browsing in Incognito mode or as a guest profile. Google states this explicitly in its Chrome Web Store help. Switch to a normal profile window first, install, and then enable Incognito access afterwards if you want it.

1. Open Chrome on a desktop or laptop and make sure you are in a normal profile window, not Incognito and not a guest session.
2. Go to the Fire Tracker listing in the Chrome Web Store and check that the publisher and the 5-star rating match what you expect.
3. Select Add to Chrome. Chrome shows a permission dialog listing what the extension can do.
4. Read the permission list, then select Add extension to approve. Chrome installs the extension and shows a confirmation.
5. Select the puzzle-piece Extensions button to the right of the address bar, find US Wildfire Tracker, and select the pin icon so the toolbar icon stays visible.
6. Select the toolbar icon once. The wildfire map opens in the Chrome side panel on the right of the window.
7. When the map asks for location, choose Allow if you want the "fires near me" distance filter; choose Block and use the state filter instead if you do not.
8. Pick your state from the filter, or leave the national view on, and confirm the fire list populates with named incidents.
9. Open one fire and check the "Last NIFC update" and "Last satellite heat" timestamps so you know how fresh the record is.
10. Leave the panel open. The map refreshes automatically every few minutes while it stays open.

What the permission dialog is telling you

Chrome's permission warnings are not decoration. Google's developer documentation states that permission warnings are displayed to users for consent before installation or at runtime, and that adding or changing host match patterns later also triggers a warning.

Two warnings are worth recognising on any wildfire mapping extension. The geolocation permission produces the warning "Detect your physical location." The notifications permission produces "Display notifications." Both are documented in Chrome's permissions list.

Installing on a managed work or school profile

Chrome profiles managed by an employer or a school can block extension installs entirely. Google notes that if you use a computer through work or school, your organization might block some extensions. In that case the install button either fails silently or the extension is force-removed on next sync.

The workaround is the web map. Because wildfire-map.org is an ordinary website, a managed profile that blocks extensions usually still opens it in a tab, and the map behaves identically apart from the docked panel.

How do you pin the fire tracker extension?

Pinning puts the US Wildfire Tracker icon permanently on the Chrome toolbar so the fire tracker extension is one click away instead of two. Select the puzzle-piece Extensions button beside the address bar, find the extension in the list, and select the pin icon next to its name.

Google's help documents the reverse operation in the same terms: to hide an individual extension you right-click its icon and select Unpin, and to bring it back you select Extensions, find the hidden extension and select Pin.

Why pinning matters more than it sounds

An unpinned fire tracker app hides behind a menu, and a menu is a decision. During a wind event you want the fire map to cost a single deliberate click, in the same place every time, with no scanning. That is the entire argument for pinning.

Pinned icons for the fire tracker extension can also be reordered. Google's help states that you drag an extension's icon to its new place on the toolbar. Put the fire tracker icon at the end of the row nearest the profile avatar, where your cursor already travels.

Managing site access for the extension

Chrome lets you narrow what any extension can reach. Google's help describes three site-access settings: "When you select the extension", "On [current site]" and "On all sites". You reach them by selecting More next to "This can read and change site data".

A wildfire map does not need to read the pages you browse. If the extension exposes a site-access choice, the most conservative setting that still works is the right one. Narrowing access does not affect the map, which pulls its data from public agency endpoints rather than from your open tabs.

Removing or repairing the extension

Removal is a right-click on the toolbar icon followed by Remove from Chrome, per Google's help. If the icon is not visible, open the Extensions page from the three-dot menu, find the extension and select Remove, then confirm.

Chrome also has a repair path. Google's documentation describes finding a corrupted extension on the Extensions page and selecting Repair, then confirming with Repair extension. Corruption usually shows up as an icon that loads nothing at all.

Side panel or full tab for a fire tracking app?

Use the Chrome side panel when you want the fire tracking app visible alongside work in the chrome fire tracker, and the full tab when you need to read perimeter shapes, compare several incidents or share a screen. The extension supports both from the same toolbar icon, and the underlying map is identical.

The side panel is a documented Chrome extension surface, not a floating window hack. Google's Side Panel API reference lists availability as Chrome 114 and later, and states that side panels have access to all Chrome APIs because they are ordinary extension pages.

What the side panel does that a tab cannot

Persistence is the difference. Chrome's documentation states that the side panel remains open when navigating between tabs if it is set to do so. A tab loses its place the moment you switch away; the panel does not.

Extensions can also wire the toolbar icon straight to the panel. The API exposes setPanelBehavior with openPanelOnActionClick set to true, which is why a single click on the icon opens the map rather than a popup menu.

Chrome 116 added sidePanel.open(), which lets an extension open the panel in response to a user gesture such as clicking the action icon or a button inside an extension page. That is the mechanism behind "open this fire in the panel" style interactions.

What the full tab does better

Perimeter geometry needs width, and this is where the fire tracker app benefits from a full window. An official perimeter polygon around a 100,000-acre incident has fingers, islands and spot-fire outliers that collapse into a blob in a 400-pixel panel. Open the full tab before you judge whether a perimeter edge is near a specific road.

Comparison work also belongs in a tab. If you are checking four incidents across two states, the fire list, the map and the detail pane all need room, and side-by-side reading beats scrolling a narrow column.

Screen sharing is the third case. Panels are cropped out of some window-capture modes, whereas a tab shares cleanly in any meeting tool. Community and agency briefings are easier from a tab.

A workable habit: panel by default, tab on demand

Keep the panel open during fire weather and promote to a tab only when a specific incident matters. That pattern keeps peripheral awareness cheap and detailed reading available, without leaving a heavy map tab consuming memory all day. If you are still weighing a browser panel against a phone app or an agency page, our comparison of fire tracking app approaches sets out the trade-offs.

The map refreshes on its own every few minutes while it is open, in the panel or the tab. If a refresh fails — a flaky hotel network, an agency endpoint returning errors — it shows the last saved results rather than an empty map.

How do you grant location to the fire tracker app?

The fire tracker app asks for browser geolocation the first time you use "fires near me". Choose Allow in the Chrome prompt and the map filters the fire list to incidents within a set distance in miles of your position. Choose Block and every other feature still works.

Chrome's behavior here is standard and documented. Google states that by default Chrome asks you when a site wants to use your location, and that you change the default under Settings, Privacy and security, Site settings, then Location under Permissions.

What Chrome actually does when you allow location

Chrome does not read a GPS chip on most desktops. Google's help explains that when you allow sites in Chrome to use your location, Chrome sends information to Google Location Services to get an estimate of where you are, and can then share that estimate with the site.

That estimate is usually derived from network signals. On a wired desktop it can be accurate to a city or a neighborhood; on a laptop with Wi-Fi it is often accurate to a few hundred feet. Neither is precise enough to matter for a 25-mile fire radius, which is why the feature works well anyway.

Choosing a radius that means something

Distance filters are only useful when the number matches a decision. A 5-mile radius answers "should I be packing right now". A 25-mile radius answers "is there something that could reach me with a wind shift". A 50-mile radius mostly answers "why does the air smell like this".

Smoke travels far further than fire. Because of that, a fire outside your radius can still degrade air quality badly, which is why our guide to a forest fire smoke tracker treats smoke and fire as two different questions with two different distance scales.

Using the map with location switched off

Blocking location costs the fire tracker app exactly one feature: automatic proximity filtering. You can still filter to any of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, search by fire name, pan to a place manually and read every incident detail.

Many people prefer this. A state filter is deterministic and gives the same result on every device, whereas a network-derived position can drift by miles when you are on a corporate VPN. Our dedicated walkthrough of a fire tracker near me workflow covers both approaches step by step.

Re-prompting after you have blocked it

Chrome remembers a Block decision, and the map cannot ask again on its own. To reverse it, open Chrome settings, go to Privacy and security, then Site settings, then Location, and move the entry out of the blocked list. Google documents this path directly.

Managed devices add one more layer. Google notes that if you use Chrome or a Chromebook at work or school, a network administrator might set location settings for you, in which case the option is greyed out and the administrator has to change it.

National or state view in a fire tracking app?

Start every session in the national view of the fire tracking app to see the shape of the day, then filter to a state when you have a specific question. The extension supports both, plus a search box and a manual refresh, and the state filter covers all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The national view earns its place because wildfire activity is regional and lumpy. On September 9, 2026, NIFC reported firefighters engaged on fires in eight geographic areas, with 59 large fires nationwide — a pattern you cannot see from inside one state.

Reading the national view in twenty seconds

Look for clusters first, not individual markers. A tight cluster of high-probability detections usually means one large incident with an active perimeter, while a long thin line of detections often means a wind-driven run across grass or sage.

Then look for isolated high-probability markers far from any cluster. Those are new starts, and new starts are where the next few hours of news come from. NOAA's geostationary detection work exists precisely because early detection changes outcomes.

When the state filter is the right tool

Use the state filter in the app to track fires when the question has a jurisdiction attached. Insurance, school closures, burn bans, prescribed-fire notices and evacuation terminology are all administered at state or county level, so a state-scoped list matches the way the answer will arrive.

State filtering also cuts noise dramatically during a national surge. In a bad week the national list can carry hundreds of entries; a single-state list is usually a page. Regional fire seasons differ enough that a single national threshold for "busy" is meaningless: a ten-fire day is quiet in California in August and remarkable in Vermont in any month.

Search, refresh and the auto-update cycle

Search in the fire tracker app matches incident names, which is how you follow a single fire across days. Agency names are stable once assigned, so searching a name you saw in a briefing will pull the same record you saw yesterday, with updated acreage and containment.

The refresh button forces an immediate re-read of the feeds instead of waiting for the automatic cycle. Use it after an official announcement, when a briefing has just ended, or when you have been offline and want to be certain you are not looking at cached results.

Automatic refresh runs every few minutes while the map is open. That cadence is deliberate: pulling government endpoints harder than that adds no information, because the upstream feeds themselves do not update faster than their own publication schedules allow.

How do you read the fire tracker app fire list?

The fire list panel in the fire tracker app is the fastest surface on the map, because it turns geometry into a sortable set of rows. Each row carries the incident name, acreage, containment percentage, discovery age and probability tier, so you can triage without clicking a single marker.

Read the list before the map when you open the chrome fire tracker. Markers tell you where; rows tell you how much, how contained and how fresh. Most decisions about whether to care are answered by the row, and the map then answers the follow-up question of direction.

Acres, containment and why they move differently

Acreage is a measured quantity that only goes up during an active fire. Containment is a percentage of the perimeter that crews consider secured, and it can fall as well as rise when a line is lost. A fire can be 40 percent contained and still growing fast on the uncontained 60 percent.

Containment is not extinguishment. A fire declared contained still has interior heat, and NOAA's account of Nebraska's Morrill Fire records that even after NIFC declared it 100 percent contained on the evening of March 24, 2026, engine crews stayed alert for scattered flare-ups within the burn scar.

Scale matters when you interpret those numbers. The Morrill Fire burned 642,029 acres and travelled more than 65 miles across Nebraska by 9:00 pm on the day it ignited, which is a rate that makes a six-hour-old acreage figure close to meaningless.

Discovery age: the number people skip

Discovery age tells you how long the incident has existed in agency records. A fire discovered three hours ago with 800 acres is a different animal from a fire discovered eleven days ago with 800 acres, even though the acreage row is identical.

New incidents are also the ones with the thinnest records. Personnel counts, incident type and managing organization frequently arrive hours after the first report, so a sparse detail panel usually means "new", not "unimportant".

Incident type and managing organization

Incident type in the fire tracking app separates wildfires from planned burns and other responses. This single field prevents the most common public misreading of any wildfire map, which is treating a scheduled prescribed burn as an emergency.

Managing organization tells you who is in charge and therefore who will publish the next update. A fire managed by a national forest publishes through Forest Service channels; a state-managed fire publishes through the state forestry agency; a county incident publishes through county emergency services.

Total personnel, when NIFC supplies it, is a rough proxy for how seriously the interagency system is treating an incident. A jump from 40 to 400 assigned personnel is a meaningful signal even before acreage catches up.

What do fire tracking app probability tiers mean?

Every detection in the fire tracking app carries a fire probability score expressed as a tier. The score fuses three things: whether an official NIFC record is linked to the detection, how fresh the NIFC perimeter is, and how recent the satellite heat from VIIRS, MODIS or GOES is.

The purpose of the score in any serious app to track fires is to stop a raw thermal anomaly from looking like a confirmed emergency. Satellites see heat, not fire. Turning heat into a claim about a wildfire requires corroboration, and the tier is a compact statement of how much corroboration exists.

What raises a probability score

A linked official record is the strongest single input. When a detection sits inside or beside an incident that NIFC has recorded, with a name, acreage and managing organization, the question is no longer whether something is burning.

Perimeter freshness is the second input. An official perimeter mapped in the last few hours is far stronger evidence than one mapped nine days ago, because perimeters are produced on agency schedules rather than continuously.

Recency of satellite heat is the third. Fresh heat across multiple passes is much harder to explain away than a single pixel on a single overpass, especially when the passes come from different instruments.

Why weak signals below 25 percent are hidden

US Wildfire Tracker hides weak signals below 25 percent probability by default, and lets you show them with a toggle. The reason is that the false-alarm modes of satellite fire detection are well documented and numerous.

NOAA's Hazard Mapping System documentation lists the usual culprits: fresh burn scars and sandy soils that raise the mid-wave infrared signal, sun glint from large solar panel clusters or metallic rooftops, and thermal anomalies from industrial activity such as steel mills and gas flaring, plus structural fires in urban areas.

Turn weak signals on when you are actively hunting for a new start in a place you know well — you can often recognise the gas flare or the quarry that produces a recurring pixel. Turn them off for everyday monitoring, where they mostly generate false worry.

How small a fire has to be before satellites miss it

There is no absolute size threshold, but NOAA publishes a usable rule of thumb. Detection algorithms for MODIS, VIIRS and GOES begin to respond when an active fire occupies at least 0.01 percent of the pixel footprint at an average fire temperature of 800 K or higher.

Applied to a 1 kilometer pixel, that works out to an active fire area of at least 100 square meters — roughly a 33-foot square. Finer resolution helps: VIIRS resolves at 375 meters, or 1,230 feet, against the 1 kilometer, 3,280-foot resolution of the older products.

Viewing angle degrades this. NOAA notes that increasing satellite view angles enlarge the effective pixel area, so a fire far from the satellite sub-point needs to be bigger to register than the same fire directly below.

Why does the fire tracker app hide old records?

The fire tracker app hides outdated incident records by default and gives you a toggle to show them. An outdated record is one whose official update and satellite heat are both old enough that the map can no longer claim the fire is active, even though the record still exists upstream.

Stale entries are the main way a fire tracker app can mislead people. A record that stops being updated does not disappear from agency feeds; it simply stops changing. Without a staleness rule, a map accumulates ghosts across a season until half its markers are fires that went out weeks ago.

Why records go stale in the first place

Agency reporting is human and prioritised. When an incident stops threatening anything, the crews and the reporting attention move to the next one, and the last published acreage becomes the permanent acreage for that record.

Satellite heat fades faster than records do. A fire that is genuinely out produces no thermal anomaly on the next VIIRS pass, so the absence of fresh heat across several passes is strong evidence even when the incident record has not been formally closed.

Small fires close quickly and quietly. Of the 53,802 fires NIFC recorded nationally in 2026 through September 9, the overwhelming majority never became large incidents, and most were resolved long before anyone published a follow-up.

When to turn outdated records back on

Turn outdated records on in the app to track fires when you are reconstructing history rather than monitoring the present. Insurance documentation, property research, post-fire access planning and journalism about a season all need the records that current-activity filters correctly remove.

They are also useful for pattern recognition on your own ground. Seeing three seasons of ignition points along the same ridge or the same stretch of highway tells you something durable about where fires start near you.

Reading a stale record honestly

If you do show outdated records, treat every number on them as a last-known value with a date attached, not a current fact. The acreage is what was reported when reporting stopped, and real final acreage is often revised later in official statistics.

National year-end figures show how much revision matters. NIFC's annual table records 8,924,884 acres burned in 2024 against 2,693,910 acres in 2023 — a difference of more than three times between consecutive years, driven by a handful of very large incidents rather than by fire counts.

Which timestamps in the fire tracker app matter?

Three timestamps in the fire tracker app detail panel carry almost all the information about freshness: "Last NIFC update", "Last satellite heat" and "Last GOES heat". Read them together, because each one fails in a different way and only the combination tells you what is happening now.

Everything else in the fire tracker app detail panel — name, acres, percent contained, discovery age, incident type, managing organization, total personnel — is only as current as the timestamp attached to it. A precise acreage with a stale update time is a precise historical fact, not a current one.

Last NIFC update

This is the moment the official interagency record last changed. It is the authoritative field for name, acreage, containment and personnel, and it moves on agency schedules: often once or twice a day on a stable incident, more often during active operations.

A long gap here during a wind event is not reassuring. It usually means the incident management team is busy managing rather than publishing, which is exactly when the satellite timestamps become the more useful pair.

Last satellite heat

This is the most recent thermal detection from a polar-orbiting instrument, meaning VIIRS or MODIS. NOAA documents that VIIRS instruments on S-NPP and NOAA-20 each provide global wall-to-wall coverage every 12 hours or less, at roughly 1:30 am and 1:30 pm local time.

MODIS adds two more looks. NOAA records that Terra, launched in December 1999, and Aqua, launched in May 2002, together provide sub-daily global observations around 10:30 am and pm and 1:30 am and pm local time.

Latency then adds to the gap. NOAA states that MODIS and VIIRS Level 1 data become available within 1 hour 30 minutes to 2 hours 30 minutes of observation, with fire processing adding another 5 to 10 minutes before a detection is usable.

Last GOES heat

Geostationary heat is the fast lane. NOAA's GOES satellites provide 5-minute observations over the contiguous United States imaging sector and 10-minute observations over the full western hemisphere disk, from positions at 75.2 degrees West and 137.2 degrees West.

The processing chain is correspondingly quicker. NOAA reports that the CONUS sector Level 1 data are usually available within 10 to 15 minutes of observation, with GOES fire processing adding another 5 to 15 minutes.

The trade is resolution. GOES pixels are coarse compared with VIIRS, and NOAA notes that satellite fire detection points mark the center of a pixel, with spatial offsets typically tens to hundreds of meters for VIIRS and up to about 1 kilometer for GOES.

Time zones and the UTC trap

Agency products are published in Coordinated Universal Time. NOAA spells out the conversion: subtract 5, 6, 7 or 8 hours from UTC for Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific time, or 4, 5, 6 and 7 hours respectively when daylight saving time is in effect.

The extension renders timestamps in your local browser time so you do not have to do that arithmetic. When you cross-check against a raw agency file, though, the raw file will be in UTC and an eight-hour error is easy to make on the West Coast.

HMS publication timing is worth knowing for the same reason. NOAA states that initial active fire detections are typically published by 8:00 AM Eastern Time and updated through the day, with the first smoke classification available between 11:00 AM and 12:00 PM Eastern and a second between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM.

Our companion article on what "live fire tracker" actually means goes further into orbital timing and why a map can be simultaneously live and hours behind on a specific fire.

How does a fire tracking app draw perimeters?

Perimeter outlines in the fire tracking app come from official interagency sources, not from drawing a shape around satellite dots. US Wildfire Tracker renders the WFIGS interagency perimeter data published through NIFC Open Data, and can additionally show historical fire perimeters as an optional layer.

That distinction is the single most important thing to understand about any fire tracking app. A cluster of hotspots is a set of observations; a perimeter is a mapped line that somebody produced, checked and published on behalf of an incident.

How agencies produce a perimeter

NOAA's account of the Morrill Fire describes the standard method plainly: a fire's perimeter is typically mapped using a combination of satellite data, aerial imaging and ground-based GPS tracking. Each of those inputs arrives on its own schedule.

Infrared mapping flights usually run overnight, when cooler surroundings make the fire edge easiest to distinguish. That is why the perimeter you see in the morning often reflects the previous night, and why an afternoon run of fire growth may not be inside the line yet.

Some fires do not get flown at all. NOAA notes that those methods may not be promptly available for every fire, especially wind-driven wildfires in the Plains, which is when analysts fall back on satellite heat detections to estimate the extent of a fast-moving fire.

Reading perimeter shapes

Perimeters drawn by the fire tracking app are rarely simple. Interior holes are unburned islands, usually wetter fuel or bare rock. Long narrow fingers show where the fire ran with wind or up a drainage. Detached polygons are spot fires that crossed a barrier ahead of the main front.

Spot fires deserve the most attention, because they show the direction the fire is throwing embers. A detached polygon a mile ahead of the main perimeter is a much stronger statement about tomorrow than an incremental bulge along the flank.

Zoom in before judging distance to a road or a property line. Perimeter geometry is generalised at low zoom levels, and a line that looks like it crosses a highway at state scale can sit half a mile away when you look properly. Our fire tracker map guide covers layer-by-layer reading in more depth.

Historical perimeters and why you would turn them on

Historical perimeters show where past fires burned. Turning that layer on around a property answers three practical questions: how often this ground has burned, from which direction fires have arrived, and where recent burn scars might now slow a fire down.

Burn scars are a genuine, if temporary, defensive feature. Recently burned ground carries less fuel for several years, which is why fire behavior analysts pay close attention to old footprints when they forecast spread.

They are also a caution for satellite reading. NOAA lists fresh burn scars among the surfaces that can produce elevated mid-wave infrared signals and therefore false detections, which is another reason weak signals are hidden by default.

How does a wildfire alert app use NWS warnings?

A wildfire alert app that takes fire weather seriously reads the National Weather Service alert service directly. US Wildfire Tracker pulls Red Flag Warnings and Fire Weather Watches from api.weather.gov and draws them as polygons over the map, alongside incident and detection layers.

These alerts are forward-looking in a way nothing else in the wildfire alert app is. Incident records and satellite heat describe what has already happened; a Red Flag Warning describes conditions that make the next ignition dangerous.

What the two fire-weather products mean

The NWS issues a Red Flag Warning when there is high confidence that Red Flag criteria will be met within the next 24 to 48 hours, or when those criteria are already being met or exceeded. It is the operational "today or tomorrow" product.

A Fire Weather Watch is the earlier heads-up, alerting land management agencies to high potential for Red Flag criteria developing in the next 12 to 72 hours. A Watch becoming a Warning is a meaningful escalation worth noticing.

Criteria are local. In the NWS Denver/Boulder forecast area, for example, Red Flag criteria are frequent gusts of 25 mph or greater combined with relative humidity of 15 percent or less, sustained for any 3 hours or more within a 12-hour period.

How the alert feed itself works

The NWS API is open data. The National Weather Service states that all information presented via the API is intended to be open data, free to use for any purpose, with no fees, though reasonable rate limits are in place to prevent abuse.

Those limits are not published. NWS says the rate limit is not public information but allows a generous amount for typical use, and that a request exceeding it returns an error that may be retried after the limit clears, typically within about 5 seconds.

Alerts are queried by area. The documented pattern for all active alerts in a state is a request to the active alerts endpoint with an area parameter, and NWS notes that the alerts endpoint holds alerts issued over the past seven days.

What a Red Flag Warning should change in your behavior

A Red Flag Warning in the wildfire alert app is not an evacuation notice and should not be read as one. It is a statement that ignitions are likely to spread fast, which changes how you should treat any new detection that appears while it is in effect.

Practically, it means shortening your checking interval, keeping the side panel open rather than closed, and treating a fresh high-probability detection upwind of you as urgent rather than interesting.

Nebraska in March 2026 is the reference case. NOAA records that Red Flag Warnings were in effect for much of the state when the Morrill Fire ignited on March 12, and by 9:00 pm that day the fire had travelled more than 65 miles.

Can the fire tracker app give directions away?

Yes. Each fire detail panel in the fire tracker app includes a share link for that specific incident, official agency links, an InciWeb search shortcut, and directions away from the fire that hand off to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze. The mapping handoff is deliberate rather than a built-in routing engine.

Sharing a fire link from the fire tracker app is more useful than sharing a screenshot. A link stays current: whoever opens it sees the same incident with the newest acreage, containment and timestamps, instead of a frozen image whose age they cannot judge.

How to share one fire correctly

Copy the share link from the fire's detail panel rather than the browser address bar, then paste it with one sentence of context: the incident name, the acreage you can see, and the "Last NIFC update" time. Those three facts prevent the most common misunderstanding, which is people assuming the numbers are live to the minute.

Add the direction of travel if you know it. A neighborhood group chat that receives "Ridge Fire, 1,200 acres, last agency update 06:40, heat detections moving northeast" can act; one that receives a red dot cannot.

Do not share the map as an authority on evacuation. Evacuation orders come from the county sheriff or the relevant emergency management agency, and repeating unofficial evacuation claims through neighborhood channels is genuinely harmful during a fast-moving incident.

Directions away from a fire

The directions feature exists because the intuitive action during a fire is the wrong one. People drive toward familiar routes, and familiar routes often run along the same drainages and ridgelines that fire follows.

Use the app to track fires to pick a destination on the opposite side of the fire from the detection cluster, then let the mapping service route you. Because the handoff opens Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze, you get live road closure and traffic data from services that already have it.

Check the route against the perimeter before you commit. If the suggested route crosses within a couple of miles of an active edge, choose a different destination rather than trusting that the road will still be open when you arrive.

Official links and InciWeb lookup

The detail panel links out to the official sources behind the record, and offers a "Search on InciWeb" shortcut. InciWeb is the interagency incident information system where large incidents publish narrative updates, closure notices and community meeting times.

Use official links when the answer needs authority rather than speed. Insurance claims, employer notifications, school decisions and press enquiries all benefit from a citation to the agency page rather than to any map.

Not every fire has an InciWeb page. Smaller incidents are managed locally and never get one, which is why the shortcut is a search rather than a guaranteed direct link.

Is the chrome fire tracker private with location?

The chrome fire tracker uses your location for exactly one purpose: finding fires near you. That position is not stored, not sold and not shared. The extension carries no advertising and no third-party ad trackers, and it requires no account, so there is no profile to attach a location to in the first place.

This is worth stating precisely because location is the most sensitive permission a fire tracker app asks for. The honest framing is not "we promise" but "here is what the data is used for, and here is how you can verify the boundaries yourself".

What Chrome exposes and what it does not

Browser geolocation is an estimate, not a tracking beacon. Google states that when you allow sites in Chrome to use your location, Chrome sends information to Google Location Services to get an estimate of where you are, and can then share that estimate with the site.

The estimate is delivered once per request, at the moment you ask for nearby fires. It is not a continuous stream, and denying the permission produces no degraded behavior beyond the loss of the distance filter.

Chrome's permission model also documents what the extension-level geolocation permission implies. The permissions list states that the geolocation permission lets an extension use the geolocation API without prompting, and shows users the warning "Detect your physical location."

How to verify the boundaries yourself

You do not have to take any privacy claim on trust. Chrome gives you three inspection points, and all three are documented by Google rather than by the extension author.

1. Open the Extensions page from the Chrome menu, select Details on US Wildfire Tracker, and read the permissions list Chrome itself reports.
2. Under "Allow this extension to read and change all your data on websites you visit", set site access to the narrowest option that still works for you.
3. Go to Settings, Privacy and security, Site settings, Location, and confirm which entries are allowed and which are blocked.
4. Revoke location at any time from that same Location page; the map falls back to the state filter with no other change.
5. If you want zero location exposure, use the state filter permanently and never grant the permission at all.

Why no-account matters more than a policy page

Systems that require sign-in accumulate identity by design: an email address, a device history, a session log. A tool with no account has nothing to join those records to, which removes an entire category of risk rather than promising to manage it.

The same logic applies to advertising. Ad-supported products need audience data, and audience data means trackers. Removing the advertising removes the commercial reason to collect anything, which is a structural guarantee rather than a stated intention.

Fire tracker app not working: how do you fix it?

Almost every fire tracker app fault falls into one of three buckets: the icon is missing, location is denied, or the data failed to load. Each has a short deterministic fix, and none of them requires reinstalling first. Work through them in that order before you remove anything.

The reason to be systematic is that the three fire tracker app faults look alike from the outside. A blank panel can mean an unpinned icon, a blocked permission or a failed fetch, and guessing wastes the time you were trying to save.

The extension icon is not visible

Nine times out of ten the fire tracker extension is installed and simply unpinned. Select the puzzle-piece Extensions button beside the address bar, find US Wildfire Tracker in the list, and select Pin, which Google documents as the standard way to bring a hidden extension back to the toolbar.

If it is not in that list at all, the install did not complete. Common causes are installing from an Incognito or guest window, which Google says is not possible, or a managed profile whose administrator blocks extensions.

If the icon is present but does nothing, try Chrome's repair path. Google's help describes finding a corrupted extension on the Extensions page and selecting Repair, then confirming, which restores the extension files without losing your place.

Location was denied or is stuck

A denied permission is sticky by design; the page cannot re-ask. Open Settings, Privacy and security, Site settings, Location, and move the entry out of the blocked list, which is the path Google documents for changing site-specific location permissions.

If Chrome shows the permission as allowed but no position arrives, check the operating system. Google warns that Windows and Mac can report "Location is turned off in your Windows (or Mac) system preferences", with a System settings link to fix it.

Corporate networks are the third cause. A VPN exit node can place your estimated position hundreds of miles away, which produces a technically successful location lookup with a completely wrong answer. Switch the VPN off, or use the state filter instead.

Data failed to load or looks frozen

When a refresh fails, the map shows the last saved results rather than an empty screen. That is the correct behavior — stale data with a visible timestamp is more useful than nothing — but it means you must read the timestamps to notice.

Press refresh first. If it still fails, the cause is usually your network rather than the agency: captive portals in hotels and airports intercept requests in ways that look identical to an outage from inside the browser.

Upstream endpoints do occasionally rate-limit. The National Weather Service says its API rate limit is not public but allows a generous amount for typical use, and that an exceeded limit returns an error which may be retried after the limit clears, typically within about 5 seconds.

The panel opens but is too narrow to use

Chrome side panels are resizable by dragging their inner edge. If the map still feels cramped, that is the signal to promote to a full tab, which is the right surface for perimeter geometry anyway.

Very old Chrome builds are the other possibility. The Side Panel API is documented as available in Chrome 114 and later, so a browser older than that cannot render the panel at all and will need updating.

Who should use an app to track fires every day?

An app to track fires earns daily use for five groups: wildland-urban interface homeowners, rural property and livestock owners, outdoor recreation planners, local journalists and emergency-adjacent professionals, and people with respiratory conditions. Each needs a different default configuration of the same map.

The common thread is that all five make decisions on a schedule, so an app to track fires has to fit that schedule; and a map that matches the schedule beats one that has to be rediscovered. Configure once for your pattern and the tool disappears into the background where it belongs.

Homeowners in the wildland-urban interface

Set a 10-mile radius, keep weak signals hidden, and check twice a day during your local fire season and hourly under a Red Flag Warning. Turn historical perimeters on once, study the burn history around your address, and turn them off again.

The number that should move you is not acreage but proximity combined with freshness. A 300-acre fire six miles upwind with heat detected 20 minutes ago is a more urgent fact than a 30,000-acre fire 40 miles away that was last updated yesterday.

Keep the panel pinned open on days when NWS has issued a Red Flag Warning for your zone. The warning tells you the ignition environment is primed; the map tells you whether anything has ignited.

Ranchers, farmers and rural landowners

Use a 25-mile radius, because livestock movement and equipment relocation need lead time that a 5-mile radius does not give you. Grass fires in the Plains routinely outrun the interval between checks.

The Morrill Fire is the case study every Plains landowner should know. It burned 642,029 acres in Nebraska after igniting on March 12, 2026, and NOAA reports it travelled more than 65 miles by 9:00 pm that same day — an area almost equal to the land area of Rhode Island.

Turn weak signals on during burn season in your county. If you know where the flares, the grain dryers and the neighbor's planned burns are, you can separate them from genuine new starts faster than an algorithm can.

Hikers, campers and road-trippers

Check the national view the night before travel, then the state view for each state on the route. Fire closures on public land are announced by the managing agency, so knowing the managing organization from the detail panel tells you whose closure notice to read.

Smoke is the more likely disruption. Fire may never come near a trailhead that nonetheless sits under a plume for a week, which is why our wildfire map guide treats trip planning as a smoke problem first and a fire problem second.

Journalists, dispatchers and community volunteers

Keep the wildfire alert app open in a dedicated window, national view, weak signals off, and rely on the shareable per-fire links for verification trails. A link to the incident beats a screenshot in any editorial process because it can be re-checked.

Always cite the agency, not the map. The map's job is to get you to the official record quickly; the official record is what belongs in a published story or an operational log.

People with asthma, COPD or heart conditions

Fire distance is the wrong variable for this group; smoke is. Use a 100-mile radius to identify plume sources, then work from air quality readings, because the EPA's Air Quality Index is the scale that maps to health guidance.

The AQI has six categories: Good from 0 to 50, Moderate 51 to 100, Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups 101 to 150, Unhealthy 151 to 200, Very Unhealthy 201 to 300, and Hazardous at 301 and higher.

Does the fire tracker extension work on Edge?

The US Wildfire Tracker fire tracker extension runs on Chromium browsers that support Chrome extensions, which in practice includes Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and Arc on desktop. The map itself runs in any modern browser through the website, with no extension required.

Chromium browsers share Chrome's extension architecture, so the chrome fire tracker behaves consistently across them; so an extension written against the documented Chrome APIs generally behaves the same way in them. The differences that matter are in the browser shell around the extension, not in the map.

Installing on Microsoft Edge

Edge can install the fire tracker extension from the Chrome Web Store once you allow it. Open the store listing in Edge, accept the prompt that permits extensions from other stores, then use Add to Chrome exactly as you would in Chrome.

Edge's side panel behaves slightly differently from Chrome's, and the toolbar overflow menu is arranged differently. The practical advice is identical: pin the icon, then decide whether you want the panel or a tab as your default surface.

Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and Arc

These browsers also accept the chrome fire tracker from the Chrome Web Store. Brave adds aggressive tracker blocking, which is irrelevant here because the extension carries no advertising or third-party ad trackers to block.

Vivaldi and Arc both offer panel or split-view surfaces of their own, which can hold the wildfire map alongside other content in ways Chrome does not. If your browser has such a feature, it is worth using.

Browsers and platforms where the extension does not run

Safari uses a different extension format and does not install Chrome Web Store extensions. Firefox uses the WebExtensions ecosystem through its own add-on store. On both, use the website instead, which is fully functional.

Mobile is the bigger constraint. Chrome for Android and Chrome for iOS do not run desktop extensions at all, so phone and tablet users open the responsive web map in a browser tab. Google's help does describe an "Add to Desktop" flow from a phone, but that installs the extension onto your desktop Chrome, not onto the phone.

Keeping desktop and mobile consistent

Bookmark the web version of the fire tracker app on your phone home screen so the same map is one tap away when you are not at a computer. Because it is the same application, the fire list, filters and detail panels match what you configured on the desktop.

Do not assume settings sync between them. Location permissions are granted per browser and per device, so allowing location on a laptop does nothing for a phone, and each device asks separately the first time.

Fire tracker app glossary: terms on the map

The fire tracker app uses interagency vocabulary rather than invented labels, because the words on the map should match the words in an official update. This glossary covers the terms most likely to be misread by someone reading a wildfire map for the first time.

Keep one habit while reading it: distinguish observations from products. Satellite hotspots are observations. Perimeters, incident records and weather alerts are products, which means a person or a documented process stands behind them.

Data and detection terms

Satellite hotspot

A pixel where an instrument measured thermal energy consistent with fire. It marks the pixel center, not the flame.

VIIRS

Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, flying on S-NPP (launched October 2011) and NOAA-20 (November 2017), resolving fire at 375 meters.

MODIS

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on Terra (December 1999) and Aqua (May 2002), resolving fire at 1 kilometer.

GOES

NOAA's geostationary satellites, providing 5-minute observations over the contiguous United States from 75.2 and 137.2 degrees West.

ABI

Advanced Baseline Imager, the primary GOES imaging instrument, with 16 spectral bands against five on the previous generation.

HMS

NOAA's Hazard Mapping System, a daily fire and smoke product with analyst quality control that adds 1 to 3 hours of latency.

Commission error

A false detection, typically from burn scars, sandy soils, sun glint, gas flaring or steel mills.

Omission error

A real fire the satellite missed, usually because of cloud, canopy, terrain or small size.

Incident and agency terms

NIFC

National Interagency Fire Center, the coordination body whose incident records and statistics underpin official fire reporting.

WFIGS

Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services, the program publishing the interagency perimeter and incident location services.

InciWeb

The interagency incident information system where larger incidents publish narrative updates and closures.

Managing organization

The agency in command of an incident, which determines where official updates are published.

Percent contained

The share of the perimeter crews consider secured. It can decrease if a line is lost, and it does not mean the fire is out.

Discovery age

Time since the incident entered agency records, which is the best single indicator of how complete the record is.

Preparedness Level

A national scale from 1 to 5 describing how committed shared firefighting resources are. It stood at 3 on September 9, 2026.

Prescribed fire

A planned, authorised burn. It produces satellite heat identical to a wildfire and is distinguished by incident type.

Weather, smoke and map terms

Red Flag Warning

Issued when NWS has high confidence Red Flag criteria will be met within 24 to 48 hours, or are already occurring.

Fire Weather Watch

Issued when there is high potential for Red Flag criteria to develop in the next 12 to 72 hours.

Relative humidity recovery

Overnight rise in humidity that normally calms fire behavior. Poor recovery is a Red Flag contributing factor.

AQI

The EPA Air Quality Index, six categories from Good (0 to 50) to Hazardous (301 and higher).

Official perimeter

The agency-mapped fire boundary, built from satellite data, aerial imaging and ground GPS tracking.

Historical perimeter

The footprint of a past fire, useful for fuel history and property research.

Fire probability score

The map's confidence tier, fusing linked official records, perimeter freshness and satellite heat recency.

Basemap

The underlying street and terrain layer. US Wildfire Tracker uses OpenStreetMap.

If you want the same vocabulary explained from the data-science side rather than the interface side, our article on wildfire tracking follows a fire from ignition through detection, mapping and containment.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Fire Tracker App