UK Wildfire Operations Dashboard

Source priority. The dashboard prioritises direct Fire & Rescue Service reporting first, then Police and Mountain Rescue, Ambulance/NHS and other public authorities, and finally authoritative media such as BBC, Reuters and Sky. When multiple reports refer to the same incident, the highest-priority primary responder source is preferred.

Source health. Live risk counters use a strict freshness gate. Direct official incident pages need active-incident wording plus a verifiable published/modified timestamp within the last 48 hours. News discovery is limited to the last 24 hours and uses BBC first-party RSS plus Google News RSS, GDELT and Bing News RSS. Selected official fire-service incident indexes are also checked directly. Fresh BBC fire reports remain visible as verification-pending intelligence even if the BBC article page blocks automated retrieval. If one discovery route fails, the others can continue to contribute. Older or undated reports never drive live counters.

Incident imagery. Curated incident photographs are used where available; otherwise verified reporting is checked for a genuine fire image, then a football-pitch size graphic is used when a defensible burned-area figure is reported.

Satellite. The dashboard refreshes its VIIRS layer every 15 minutes. Raw thermal anomalies are displayed separately and do not trigger a warning by themselves.

Screening method. Screening rule. A site can be triggered either by a freshness-verified authoritative reported fire or by a qualifying satellite cluster. A satellite concern still requires at least two nominal/high-confidence VIIRS detections within 1 mile of each other, no more than 12 hours old, including at least one high-confidence detection. Authoritative news must be published within the last 24 hours and clearly describe a real fire/blaze/wildfire incident. Direct official incident pages must also expose a recent published/modified timestamp before they can drive live risk counters. Verified-fire cards prioritise authoritative incident details and do not show blank satellite metrics. Satellite fire intensity is shown only when a qualifying satellite cluster exists. Reported fire size is shown only when a current source explicitly states a size. Hectares, acres, square kilometres and square miles are also converted to an approximate football-pitch equivalent using a standard 105×68m pitch. Current temperature, apparent temperature, humidity, conditions, wind and gusts refresh with the same 15-minute dashboard cycle. Wind direction is compared with the bearing from the cluster to the site to indicate whether wind is broadly toward, crosswind or away from the site. The 5-day timeline is a weather outlook, not a fire-spread forecast. For satellite-derived risk, distance is measured to the closest qualifying VIIRS fire-detection point within the cluster. For verified reported fires, distance is measured to the geolocated incident point or published location; where an exact perimeter is unavailable this remains approximate. This is intentionally conservative. The fire-intelligence feed separates verified incidents from fresh authoritative reports awaiting verification. Pending reports remain visible to operators but do not trigger Critical/Concern counters until corroborated. FireMap.live is included as an independent visual cross-check source, not as a sole automatic trigger because its public site does not expose a documented open incident API. If source coverage is degraded the dashboard says so instead of presenting a misleading zero. Satellite data indicates thermal activity, not an exact flame front or confirmed wildfire perimeter.