Forecast
Fire Weather & Risk Outlook
Live federal fire-weather alerts · Firewatch seasonal risk surface · the daily forecast roadmap
This page combines two different things, and we want to be precise about which is which. The alerts below are live federal data. Red Flag Warnings and Fire Weather Watches issued by National Weather Service forecasters, fetched from the NWS API the moment you loaded this page. The map further down is our model’s seasonal snapshot. a season-scale ranking generated in April, not a daily prediction. Daily Firewatch forecasts are in development but not yet published; the status box explains why.
Source: NWS public alerts API (api.weather.gov), filtered to the 11 western states. These are official federal alerts, not Firewatch model output. For life-safety decisions, follow your local NWS office and emergency managers.
Read this map carefully. Firewatch seasonal risk surface, generated April 8, 2026 from pre-season conditions (snowpack, drought, fuels, climate). This is a season-scale ranking of where large fires are most likely to concentrate, not a daily prediction. It has not been updated since April 8 and does not reflect weather since then. The model is under independent re-validation; see Methods. The full interactive version with snowpack, active fires, and air quality layers lives on the homepage.
New, experimental: weekly outlook (Firewatch v3). Turn on “Weekly outlook” in the map’s layer list to see which areas rank highest this week for the start of a fire that later grows past 1,000 acres. It is built from recent weather, recent ignitions and fire history. In a pre-registered back-test on 2019–2024 (held-out areas within the training years; an earlier version had already been scored on that period, so it was not a blind test) it beat a fire-history baseline. Scored after the fact on the 2025 and 2026 seasons (new seasons and held-out areas; preliminary, with 2026 counted through late September from WFIGS fire records), its advantage in the top 25% of cells held up (+7.4 points, 95% CI +3.2 to +11.6) but its advantage in the top 10% was not confirmed (+0.8 points, CI −2.7 to +4.4). Its probabilities are no better calibrated than fire history’s. The live weekly issues are archived with a hash but have not yet been graded, and the grading rule for them has not yet been pre-registered. Each issue is dated; the April 8 surface above stays unchanged because it is the forecast being graded on the scorecard. Neither replaces Red Flag Warnings or local officials.
Daily 4km Firewatch forecasts are not yet published. The model is being re-validated with spatially blocked held-out testing before we publish daily numbers, the earlier 0.911 AUC-ROC has been withdrawn because the original evaluation allowed spatial memorization. We will not publish a forecast we can’t stand behind. Track progress, and every correction we make along the way, on the Scorecard.
Until our daily model forecast ships (see the roadmap on Methods), these are the authoritative daily products. They are produced by professional fire-weather forecasters, updated on fixed schedules, and used operationally by fire agencies. If you need a daily answer today, start here, not with us.
Monthly and seasonal outlooks from National Interagency Fire Center Predictive Services, the standard reference for where significant fire potential is above or below normal.
Storm Prediction Center day 1, 2, and 3–8 fire weather outlooks, critical and extremely critical fire weather areas, issued multiple times daily.
National Weather Service fire weather portal. Red Flag Warnings, Fire Weather Watches, and zone forecasts from local forecast offices.
Live alerts: NWS api.weather.gov, fetched client-side on page load. Seasonal risk surface: Firewatch model, generated April 8, 2026; see Methods for model details, limitations, and the re-validation in progress. This page is not an operational tool for evacuation or life-safety decisions.