Platform briefing

What Wildfire Ahead is, and how it works

A plain-language briefing on the platform: what problem it solves, how information moves through it, who uses it, and what it deliberately leaves to the responsible authority.

What it is

When a wildfire starts, nobody has the whole picture. A satellite sees a hot patch of ground. A camera on a ridge sees smoke. Somebody phones it in. A weather service says the wind turns this afternoon. Each holds one piece, in its own format, with its own idea of how certain it is. Wildfire Ahead brings those pieces together and works out what they mean as a whole.

It is not another fire map. It is the layer underneath one: it gathers what every source is saying about the same fire and reconciles it.
It shows its working. Every figure can be opened to see what went into it, where each input came from, how old it is and what disagreed.
It decides nothing. It does not issue alerts, order resources, direct evacuation or operate aircraft. Those belong to the responsible authority.
It works across the whole season: aiming prevention work beforehand, supporting people during an incident, and keeping a durable record afterwards.

How it works, in five steps

Everything the platform does fits into this shape.

CollectThe platform reaches 42 registered public feeds across fifteen agencies in Canada and the United States — satellite detections, weather, fuels and terrain, drought, lightning and official fire records — each on its own schedule.
CheckEverything that arrives is kept exactly as it came and checked in isolation before anything else can use it. The original is never edited, so what was actually received can always be recovered.
CompareAgencies use the same words to mean different things. The platform converts them onto common ground, records what each conversion loses, and works out which records describe the same fire — without merging them.
Work outModels estimate how likely a detection is to be a real fire, how it might grow and what it could reach — always with a range rather than a single number, and with a refusal to answer where conditions fall outside what was tested.
ShowThe result reaches people: a ranked list of what to look at first, a shared picture for the people working the incident, and, once an authorised person approves it, a public record with the location generalised.

Who uses it

Fire agencies and coordination centres; utilities, forestry, mining, railways, municipalities and others who own assets a fire could reach; researchers who need the underlying evidence; and the public, through a separate surface that carries only released information.

What it does not do

This briefing explains the platform. It carries no live fire, smoke or evacuation information, so it is not the fastest route to what is happening now.

Go to current official information

See it for yourself

Two interactive versions of this briefing. Both run in the browser, both read in plain language or technical register, and both write out everything they show as text, so nothing is locked inside the animation.