Tracking Active Wildfires

Leveraging NASA FIRMS, AWS Lambda, and GitHub Actions to serve real-time wildfire data to the public.

Background

This personal project automates an Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) workflow that fetches and visualizes active fire data within Los Angeles County using NASA VIIRS satellite data.

Features

🕒 Automated Daily Updates

GitHub Actions runs a cron job every morning at 8 AM PST to fetch and update active wildfire data.

📡 NASA FIRMS Integration

Pulls VIIRS fire detection data directly from NASA’s FIRMS API, ensuring near real-time coverage.

🗂️ Geospatial Clipping

Clips global fire data to Los Angeles County using the county’s official boundary shapefile.

🔄 7-Day Filtering

Filters fire data to display only hotspots detected within the past 7 days for relevancy.

🌐 Coordinate Reprojection

Reprojects all fire data to match LA County's local geographic coordinate reference system.

🗺️ Interactive Web Map

Folium-powered map includes FRP intensity markers, bright_ti4/ti5 heat detection, and toggleable base maps.

📱 Responsive Design

Mobile-first layout adapts smoothly to all screen sizes so users can track fires on any device.

🚀 AWS S3 Hosting

Automatically uploads and serves the latest map version to a public AWS S3 bucket.

🧠 Streamlined ETL Pipeline

Clean separation of Extract, Transform, Load stages improves clarity, maintainability, and automation.

VIEW WEB MAP SEE ON GITHUB

Gallery

Wildfire Web Map Thumbnail