Witness

Fires seen by NASA's VIIRS satellites near the front line in Ukraine, grouped into ~5 km cells. A record of where the fighting burns, hours after it happens.

– combat-likely fires
unfiltered · baseline pending Loading…
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How this works

Three weather satellites (Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21) carry the VIIRS sensor, which picks up hot spots about 375 m across. Each one passes over Ukraine about twice a day. NASA's FIRMS service publishes the detections about three hours after each pass. Witness pulls them every 30 minutes.

A fire counts as combat-likely when it is within 50 km of the front line, or within 30 km of the Ukraine–Russia border. The front line comes from DeepStateMap's daily map of occupied territory.

What it can't tell you. Clouds hide fires, so a quiet day on the map can just be a cloudy day. Not every fire near the front is combat. Crop and grass burning gets counted too until the pre-war baseline filter is switched on. The map does not show who fired, what was hit, or where anyone is. Detections are grouped into ~5 km cells and are always hours old.

Sources: NASA FIRMS (VIIRS NRT), DeepStateMap, OpenFreeMap / OpenStreetMap contributors.