EFFIS

What you can build

• Warn sites under Extreme fire danger

  Read tomorrow's FWI class for each site's grid cell and draft a notice for the site lead when it reaches Very High or above, for a manager to send.

  With Severe Weather Notice

• Hold deliveries into an active fire zone

  Match delivery addresses to hotspots from the last 24 hours and propose a hold on affected orders until the hotspot layer clears.

  With Weather Hold

• Check an evacuation roster against hotspots

  When a hotspot falls inside a site's watch radius, assemble who is on site from the schedule and propose the roster a person confirms.

  With Evacuation Roster

• Re-route a field crew around a fire perimeter

  Compare planned routes to current burnt area perimeters and recent hotspots and propose a detour for a dispatcher to approve.

  With Route Deviation

Requirements

• Site or route coordinates in the EFFIS area of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa
• A WMS/WFS client or a download step for maps.effis.emergency.copernicus.eu layers
• Attribution under CC BY 4.0 with changes indicated, as the EFFIS data licence requires
• A Data Request Form submission for historic data, fire database extracts or raw burnt area perimeters

Authentication

No key or account. WMS and WFS layers and downloads are open; the Data Request Form is for historic data and raw perimeters, and the admin login is for Expert Group members.

Limits

• Hotspot location is only as accurate as the sensor; small fires or fires under smoke or cloud can go undetected
• Not every hotspot is a wildfire: the satellites also see other heat sources, and the filter reduces but does not remove them
• The fire danger forecast is a weather-driven index, not a prediction that a fire will start
• Historic data and raw burnt area perimeters come only by Data Request Form, not from the web services

Questions and answers

Where do the EFFIS hotspots come from?

From NASA FIRMS. EFFIS takes MODIS detections at 1 km resolution and VIIRS detections at 375 m, normally updated six times a day, and shows them within 2–3 hours of the satellite pass. A knowledge-based filter removes many non-wildfire heat sources such as agricultural burning.

What licence covers EFFIS data?

EU-owned content on the EFFIS site is under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, implementing the Commission Decision of 12 December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents. Give credit and indicate changes. Third-party content and trademarks are excluded.

How far ahead does the fire danger forecast run?

Up to 9 days from the ECMWF model at about 8 km resolution, and up to 3 days from the Météo-France model at about 10 km. The classes run from Low to Very Extreme, the last added in June 2021.