Reference · built on requestCommons signalHazards & public safety

Canadian Wildland Fire Information System

Hotspots, fire danger ratings, Fire Weather Index and fire behaviour layers for Canada from Natural Resources Canada's CWFIS.

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About

The Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (CWFIS) is run by Natural Resources Canada's Canadian Forest Service at the Northern Forestry Centre in Edmonton. It publishes daily maps and data layers for the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System: satellite hotspots, fire danger ratings, Fire Weather Index and Fire Behaviour Prediction grids, station weather and forecasts. Layers come from the CWFIS GeoServer as WMS, WFS and WCS, and current products are downloadable from the Datamart as CSV, shapefile and grids.

Through Fibric, an operator reads the hotspots and danger rating around your Canadian sites and routes and proposes holds, notices or route changes for a person to approve.

This is a reference listing. It documents what Fibric would read from Canadian Wildland Fire Information System and what it could propose, based on the publisher's published interfaces. Fibric builds it under a managed deployment when you request it; selecting it here installs nothing.

Inputs

  • hotspots_last24hrs and hotspots_last7days: satellite-detected hotspots, also as a daily CSV with lat, lon, rep_date, source, sensor, fwi, fuel, ros and hfi columns
  • m3_polygons_current: the current-day fire perimeter estimate derived from buffered season-to-date hotspots
  • activefires_current: active fire locations collected daily from most fire management agencies
  • fdr_current: the current fire danger rating, showing forecast conditions until the day's actual weather arrives
  • FWI and FBP grids such as fwi_current: FFMC, DMC, DC, ISI, BUI, FWI, DSR, fire type, rate of spread and head fire intensity
  • firewx_stns_current and firewx_scribe_fcst: weather and FWI at stations, and the SCRIBE 24-hour station forecast
  • nat_fbpfuels: national FBP fuel types, and archived daily map images by maptype and date such as fdr20160417

Proposed actions

Read-only. This feed informs operators; it changes nothing.

Proposed actions are target capabilities. Every action runs propose-first and needs a validated deployment and the appropriate permissions.

What you can build

  • Hold shipments into a hotspot cluster

    Compare delivery postal areas with hotspots_last24hrs and propose a hold on affected orders, with the hotspot count and the FWI value, for a person to confirm.

    With Weather Hold

  • Brief drivers on today's fire danger

    Read fdr_current and m3_polygons_current along planned routes and propose a detour or a delay where a route crosses a perimeter estimate.

    With Route Deviation

  • Send a danger-rating notice to remote sites

    When fdr_current reaches Extreme for a site's cell, draft a notice with the FWI and forecast values for the site lead to send.

    With Severe Weather Notice

  • Prepare an evacuation roster for a camp

    When a hotspot lands inside a camp's watch radius, pull who is on shift and propose the roster and contact list for a person to confirm.

    With Evacuation Roster

Requirements

  • Site coordinates in Canada and an OGC client or a download step for CSV and shapefile products
  • The citation from licence.txt: Canadian Forest Service, CWFIS, Natural Resources Canada, Northern Forestry Centre, Edmonton, Alberta
  • For WCS coverage requests, BBOX and WIDTH/HEIGHT parameters, which are mandatory
  • Layer-name date suffixes (year, month, day, plus sf or xf) to fetch past or forecast layers
Authentication
No key or account. The GeoServer WMS, WFS and WCS endpoints and the Datamart downloads are open under the Open Government Licence – Canada.

Limits

  • fdr_current shows forecast conditions until actual station weather is received, so the morning rating can change later in the day
  • activefires_current is collected daily from most, not all, fire management agencies
  • The CSV hotspot files are per day; multi-day history means fetching each file or querying WFS
  • The Datamart site itself needs JavaScript; the stable interfaces are the /downloads/ index and the GeoServer

Access and pricing

Reference listing. Public feed access is separate from Fibric integration. If you request this feed, your quote covers the build, usage, and support.

Request Canadian Wildland Fire Information System ↗

Questions and answers

Which formats can I request from the CWFIS GeoServer?
WMS GetMap returns GIF, GeoRSS, GeoTIFF, JPEG, KML, OpenLayers, PDF and PNG. WFS GetFeature returns CSV, GML, GeoJSON, KML and shapefile. WCS GetCoverage returns GeoTIFF, GTOPO30, ArcGrid and gzipped ArcGrid, and needs BBOX with WIDTH and HEIGHT. GetCapabilities is at cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/geoserver/public/wms.
What licence covers the data?
The Open Government Licence – Canada. The licence.txt in the Datamart asks you to acknowledge the source as: Canadian Forest Service. Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (CWFIS), Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Northern Forestry Centre, Edmonton, Alberta.
How do I get a past date or a forecast layer?
Append the date to the layer name: fwi20230604 for a past day. Add sf for the short-term forecast (fwi20230612sf) or xf for the long-term forecast (fwi20230614xf). Archived map images follow maptype plus yyyymmdd, such as fdr20160417.
Ask about Canadian Wildland Fire Information System

Ask about the capabilities and requirements in this listing.

For project-specific requirements, contact Fibric.

This Commons signal listing is developed, published, and supported by Fibric. It reads public data published by Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service (cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca). Upstream agencies and projects are the property of their respective owners, who are not affiliated with Fibric and do not sponsor or endorse this listing. Trademark policy