Sources & coverage
Fire Radar combines public official incident information from multiple fire and rescue services. Each service publishes different levels of detail, so coverage is not uniform.
A blank area of the map does not mean that no fires occurred there. Fire Radar can only capture incidents that an enabled authority makes publicly available through the source we can reliably ingest. Some services publish broad live feeds; others publish only incidents they consider significant or useful to the public and media.
Some live feeds can also publish an ongoing incident before revealing what type of incident it is. Fire Radar only counts it as an ongoing fire once the published information confirms that it is a fire.
How Fire Radar scores public fire-service feeds
The percentage is a Fire Radar source-quality score: how useful the authority’s public feed is for a current incident map. Feed-frequency labels are Fire Radar classifications of the public source; where an authority does not publish a formal update SLA, Fire Radar uses a cautious event-driven / variable description rather than claiming a fixed delay. It is not a rating of the fire and rescue service itself. The score combines freshness (35%), breadth/completeness of public incident reporting (35%) and incident detail (30%).
Timely public data with useful incident detail. It may still be selective if the authority says so.
Delayed, aggregated or less complete, but still useful when Fire Radar handles the source model carefully.
Irregular or sparse public incident publication, typically major/significant incidents only or weak location/detail.
Authority Intelligence Profiles
Each enabled authority has its own Fire Radar profile describing how that service publishes incidents, how fresh and complete the public source is, how Fire Radar parses and geocodes it, and which news services are searched. The individual authority adapter then converts that source into the standard Fire Radar incident view.
Other Fire Radar data sources
Wind: Open-Meteo using UK Met Office model data.
Satellite: NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), including Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) thermal-anomaly observations. These are not treated as confirmed fires by themselves.
Map: OpenStreetMap.
Related news: trusted third-party publishers are kept separate from official operational facts and are used for context, not to overwrite official status.