WFIGS

Interagency wildfire incident records used as authoritative wildfire ground truth across the United States.

Overview

WFIGS aggregates geospatial information on active and historical wildland fire incidents, representing officially reported incidents rather than satellite-detected hotspots.

In PyHazards it acts as an authoritative wildfire ground-truth source for validation, labeling, and comparison against remote-sensing detections.

At a Glance

Provider

National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) / interagency WFIGS

Hazard Family

Wildfire

Source Role

Incident Records

Coverage

United States

Geometry

Incident points and perimeters

Spatial Resolution

Event-level vector geometries

Temporal Resolution

Event-based with live operational updates

Update Cadence

Refreshed from IRWIN roughly every 5 minutes, with perimeter changes often appearing within 15 minutes

Period of Record

Historical archive plus ongoing incidents

Formats

ArcGIS REST services, GeoJSON, and Shapefile downloads

Inspection CLI

python -m pyhazards.datasets.wfigs.inspection --path /path/to/wfigs_data --max-items 10

Data Characteristics

  • Event-based incident records with point and polygon geometries.

  • Operational data that can change as incidents evolve and records are reconciled.

  • Common fields include incident identifiers, timing, status, location, and fire size.

  • Current and year-to-date layers follow different retention rules.

Typical Use Cases

  • Ground-truth labeling of wildfire occurrence.

  • Validation of satellite-based fire detection products.

  • Analysis of ignition timing and incident geography.

Access

Use the links below to access the upstream source or its public documentation.

PyHazards Usage

Use this dataset through the public inspection or registry surface documented below.

This dataset is currently documented as an external or inspection-first source rather than a public load_dataset(...) entrypoint.

Inspection Workflow

Use the documented inspection path below to validate local files before training or analysis.

python -m pyhazards.datasets.wfigs.inspection --path /path/to/wfigs_data --max-items 10

Reference