What this cannot tell you
Silence does not mean safety
This is the most important limit on this page. Cloud hides fires completely. Satellites pass overhead only every few hours, so anything that starts and finishes between passes is never seen. If nothing appears near a place you care about, that means no satellite saw a fire there. It does not mean nothing happened.
It cannot see a building
Each satellite pixel covers about 375 metres. A house, an apartment block or a single vehicle burning is far too small and too cool to register. What registers is fire across open ground, woodland, or something very large burning hard.
It cannot tell you the cause
A burning field looks identical from orbit whether it was lit by a farmer or by a shell. Only the pattern across a whole region carries meaning, never a single detection.
It cannot count who is there now
Population data for Ukraine comes from a model built on settlement mapping made before the war, scaled to reference population totals. It does not reflect wartime displacement, and population in front-line and occupied areas has moved substantially since February 2022. We use it only to describe the general setting around a detection, such as a built-up area, farmland or open country. We never estimate how many people are there today: for any detection we show only distance and direction to the nearest settlement, never a count of people or homes.
This map leaves some countries out on purpose
This map deliberately excludes heat detections in neighbouring countries not party to this conflict: Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia. Real fires there were detected by the same satellites as everything else on this map. They are left off here as an editorial choice about what belongs on a conflict map, not because nothing was seen.
Data sources
- NASA FIRMS active fire detections, from the VIIRS and MODIS instruments
- Map data from OpenStreetMap contributors
The same satellite feed used by fire services and researchers worldwide. We add no data of our own: everything here is a measurement, or an arithmetic comparison of measurements.