Oregon Fire Map: Track Oregon Wildfires Live in 2026

A live Oregon fire map puts official incident records and perimeters, NASA and NOAA satellite heat detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts on one screen, so you can tell a new start in the high desert from a contained fire in the Cascades in seconds.

What does an Oregon fire map show right now?

An Oregon fire map draws on four public feeds at once: official incident records from the National Interagency Fire Center, mapped fire perimeters, satellite thermal detections from NASA's VIIRS and MODIS instruments and NOAA's geostationary GOES analysis, and live National Weather Service fire-weather alerts.

Satellite heat is the fast layer. Polar-orbiting passes cross Oregon several times a day and the geostationary analysis fills the gaps, so a fresh thermal signal with no matching incident record usually means a start that has not yet been catalogued by a dispatch center.

US Wildfire Tracker fuses all four on its free live fire map and attaches a fire probability tier to every detection. That tier blends whether an official record is linked, how fresh the perimeter is and how recent the heat signal is, and weak signals below 25 percent stay hidden by default because they are often prescribed burns or industrial heat.

When is Oregon's wildfire season?

Oregon does not have one statewide fire season with fixed dates. The Oregon Department of Forestry declares fire season district by district, so protection districts in southwest Oregon typically enter fire season weeks before the north coast does, and they leave it later.

In practice the state's large-fire window runs from late June through September, peaking from mid-July to early September when fuels are at their driest and thunderstorms cross the Cascades and the Blue Mountains. East-side rangeland can carry fire earlier, as soon as spring grass cures.

Once a district declares fire season, ODF imposes public use restrictions and Industrial Fire Precaution Levels on woods operations. The agency publishes both as interactive restriction maps and lists public restrictions separately for each of its 12 protection districts, from Northwest Oregon and Western Lane to Klamath-Lake, including the Douglas, Coos and Walker Range forest protective association districts.

Recent seasons show how wide that district-by-district spread is. In 2026 the Central Oregon District declared fire season first, on May 8, and Northwest Oregon last, on June 15. The 2025 season ended statewide on October 17, when the last districts terminated their restrictions.

ODF states on its fire information and statistics page that it keeps wildfire statistics for its own protection jurisdiction, which it describes as 16 million acres of private and public forestland. Federal land is counted separately, which is why a statewide acreage figure and an ODF figure never match.

Those two seasons are the argument for reading acreage rather than fire counts. 2025 produced about a thousand more starts than 2024 statewide but roughly a sixth of the acreage, and ODF reported putting out 94 percent of fires on its land at 10 acres or fewer.

Which agencies fight wildfires in Oregon?

Oregon splits wildfire responsibility three ways. The Oregon Department of Forestry protects state and private forestland, federal agencies protect federal land, and the Oregon Department of the State Fire Marshal brings structural firefighting resources in when homes and businesses are threatened.

ODF describes itself in blunt terms: "As Oregon's largest fire department, ODF's Fire Protection Program protects 16 million acres of forest, a $60 billion asset." Its stated doctrine is equally blunt — "Put out fires quickly at the smallest possible size" — backed by about 800 personnel and more than 300 engines, tenders and dozers.

The State Fire Marshal runs the other half of the system. OSFM supports statewide community and structure protection through partnerships with over 300 local fire departments and oversees the Oregon Fire Mutual Aid System, which is mobilized under the Emergency Conflagration Act when a fire outruns local capacity.

Three forest protective associations — Coos, Douglas and Walker Range — carry out protection in their own districts under the same system, which is why ODF's restriction pages list them alongside its own districts.

Above all of them sits the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center in Portland, which covers Oregon and Washington together. Its stated mission is to be "the northwest area geographic focal point to provide logistical support and intelligence relative to anticipated and ongoing wildfire activity" for federal and cooperating state agencies.

Evacuations are separate again. County sheriffs issue them, the Oregon Department of Emergency Management publishes the statewide dashboards, and the state's official wildfire site groups its live resources under headings including the OEM Oregon Fires Dashboard, ODF Fire Danger, DEQ Air Quality Monitoring and ODOT TripCheck. Neighbouring Washington uses the same division of labor.

Where do Oregon wildfires usually burn?

Most of Oregon's burned acreage is east and south of the Cascade crest. The high desert and rangeland of Malheur, Harney and Lake counties, the Klamath Basin, the east Cascades and the Blue Mountains produce the state's largest fires, and the biggest of them all have burned in sagebrush and juniper rather than timber.

West of the crest the picture inverts. Douglas fir and hemlock forests are usually too wet to burn at scale, but they hold enormous fuel loads, so when a dry east wind arrives late in the season the west side can produce fires far more destructive than anything on the east side.

The Labor Day 2020 fires proved that point. A single east-wind event drove multiple fires down the west Cascades simultaneously, destroying whole communities in the Santiam and McKenzie canyons — a scenario the state now plans for explicitly.

What are the largest Oregon wildfires ever?

Oregon's record book has two halves. The largest single fires by acreage burned in the southeast desert, while the most destructive burned on the wet west side during east-wind events. Each superlative below is scoped exactly as its source scopes it.

The 2020 entry is the one to study. ODF records that the five megafires rank in Oregon's top 20 largest wildfires since 1900 and that they grew over just three days, driven by east-northeast winds sustained at 20 to 30 miles per hour with gusts of 50 to 60, and a peak gust over 100 miles per hour recorded at Timberline Lodge.

What weather drives Oregon fire danger?

Oregon's dangerous fire days share three ingredients: strong wind, very low relative humidity and fuels that have already dried out. When forecasters expect those to combine, the National Weather Service issues a Red Flag Warning for the affected fire-weather zones.

The NWS defines a Red Flag Warning as an alert issued "in conjunction with land management agencies, to alert land managers to an ongoing or imminent critical fire weather pattern," and issues it when conditions are occurring or expected shortly. A Fire Weather Watch is the earlier stage, meaning critical conditions are "possible but not imminent or occurring."

Three forecast offices cover Oregon: Portland for the northwest, Medford for the southwest and Pendleton for the east. A live map that carries their alert polygons lets you see the warning area and the fires inside it together instead of checking two sites.

Dry lightning deserves separate attention. A single storm crossing the Blue Mountains or the Ochocos can start dozens of fires in an afternoon, which is why the count of new incidents on a map can jump overnight without any single large fire growing.

The west side has its own trigger. NWS Portland's post-season review notes that "Typically, there is at least one September wind/RH event," and that the Labor Day 2020 firestorm was "a historic wind/RH episode, resulting in multiple mega-fires." An east wind in September is the single condition that turns a wet-forest region into a fast-fire region.

How do Be Ready, Be Set, Go Now levels work?

Oregon uses a three-level evacuation system, published by the state under the heading "Evacuations: Be Ready. Be Set. Go Now!" County sheriffs issue the levels and the state wildfire site carries the official wording for each one.

Two practical notes. Levels are not guaranteed to arrive in order, so a wind shift can move a neighborhood straight from Level 1 to Level 3. And the levels are geographic, not personal: check the boundary of the level area, because the line often follows a road or a drainage rather than a town limit.

Washington runs the same three-level structure with slightly different official phrasing, which matters if you own property on both sides of the Columbia. The Northern Rockies states use different language again.

How do you read an Oregon fire map fast?

Checking Oregon fire activity should take less than a minute. This sequence works on the live map or in the Chrome side panel, and it puts proximity ahead of headline acreage.

1. Open the map and filter to Oregon, or allow location access to see only fires within a set distance in miles of where you are.
2. Read the fire probability tier before the acreage. Weak signals below 25 percent are hidden by default because they often reflect prescribed burns or industrial heat.
3. Open the nearest incident and compare three timestamps: last NIFC update, last satellite heat and last GOES heat. Fresh heat under an old perimeter means the fire is still moving.
4. Check whether a Red Flag Warning polygon covers your area, since that changes how quickly the picture can change.
5. Confirm your evacuation level with your county sheriff or emergency alerts, then use the directions-away links if you need to move.

For the mechanics behind each layer, our fire tracker guide explains how incident records, perimeters and thermal detections are produced, and the wildfire map guide covers how to read a national view without misjudging small hotspots.

What does wildfire smoke do to Oregon air?

Smoke reaches far more Oregonians than flame does. Smoke from fires in the Cascades and the Klamath Basin routinely settles into the Rogue, Umpqua and Willamette valleys, and late-summer inversions can hold it in place for days after the fire that produced it stops growing.

Air quality is reported on the Air Quality Index. The EPA describes it as six color-coded categories and notes that for each pollutant "an AQI value of 100 generally corresponds to an ambient air concentration that equals the level of the short-term national ambient air quality standard for protection of public health."

Oregon DEQ measures that with "a network of air monitoring and sampling equipment at more than 40 sites throughout Oregon," and its published threshold for issuing a wildfire smoke advisory is a forecast 24-hour average PM2.5 concentration at or above 35.5 micrograms per cubic meter — the bottom of the Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups band.

DEQ also names the sources it considers valid, including the Oregon Smoke Blog, its own AQI map and the EPA Fire and Smoke Map, and warns that some consumer sensor networks have reported values "1.5 to 2 times higher in Oregon than actual PM2.5 values." Our smoke tracking guide explains how to read plume forecasts against monitor readings.

Frequently asked questions about the Oregon fire map