Methodology, sources and citation

1. What kanari detects

kanari aggregates public satellite thermal detections: NASA FIRMS (375 m VIIRS sensors on Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21, several passes a day), NOAA GOES-East and GOES-West (Americas, 10-minute refresh) and EUMETSAT Meteosat MTG FCI Active Fire Monitoring (Europe and Africa, 10 minutes). Timestamps are the agencies' own, in UTC; kanari produces none.

A satellite hotspot is not necessarily a wildfire: it can be an agricultural burn, an industrial flare, an urban fire or a false alarm. Clouds hide fires; no detection does not mean no fire.

2. Fusion and verification

Detections are clustered into fire events (cells of about 4 km). The first detection is the proxy for ignition time. Each event gets a level: 'possible' (a single geostationary sensor), 'probable' (several detections or a VIIRS sensor), 'corroborated' (cross-checked with public witness reports).

Witness reports (Bluesky, press via GDELT, Telegram) are geoparsed then assessed twice by independent AI models (relevance, place, recency) before being attached to an event. Every displayed report is public and linked to its source.

3. Archiving and thresholds

An event becomes a permanent page (fire memory) when it is corroborated, or above thresholds: in France, at least 2 detections or 20 MW of fire radiative power; elsewhere, at least 8 detections or 100 MW. kanari totals (daily reports, statistics, per-country and per-month observatory) count these significant fires: they are not comparable to exhaustive official tallies, which include small fires extinguished before any satellite pass.

The archive starts on August 3, 2026. Each record keeps the per-sensor detection timeline, peak power, status (active or ended), witness reports and firefighting aircraft observed nearby.

4. Measured earliness

For every corroborated event of the last 72 hours, kanari compares the time of the first satellite pass with the publication time of the first press article found. The gap is the measured lead over the press. It says nothing about a lead over emergency services, which have faster channels (emergency calls, lookouts, cameras). Cases and the median are published on the Earliness page.

5. Firefighting aircraft

Positions of water bombers and firefighting helicopters come from ADS-B transponders, identified by registration and ICAO type. Aircraft fly in daylight; absence on the map is not absence of deployment.

6. Limits and proper use

kanari is an independent information service, not an official alert channel. No safety decision should rely on this data alone. In an emergency: 112 in Europe, 911 in North America, 193 in Brazil, or the local emergency number.

Real-time figures may be revised when an event is merged, requalified or closed. Archive pages show their last update time.

7. Open data and licence

All kanari data is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Free reuse, including commercial, provided 'kanari.io' is credited with a link. Full archive as CSV: kanari.io/opendata/feux.csv. JSON API and MCP server documented at kanari.io/en/api. Source code is public on GitHub.

8. How to cite kanari

Suggested format (text):

kanari (2026). Archive of wildfires detected by satellite and verified witnesses [dataset]. https://kanari.io. Accessed YYYY-MM-DD.

BibTeX:

@misc{kanari2026,
  author = {kanari},
  title  = {kanari: wildfire detections and archive (satellite + verified witnesses)},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://kanari.io},
  note   = {CC BY 4.0. Open data: https://kanari.io/opendata/feux.csv}
}

A persistent identifier (DOI) for the dataset is being registered; this page will be updated.