Where Illinois is burning, right now. Every circle on the map is a hotspot picked up in the last 24 hours by NASA satellites: size grows with the intensity of the fire, colour summarises how serious it is. Below the map you will find each hotspot with its nearest town and state, and how far it sits from the centre of Illinois.
Over the past twelve months satellites recorded 309 hotspots of significant intensity in Illinois, spread over just 95 days of the year. On most days this map is empty, and that is the accurate picture: Illinois is mostly farmland, and of the 18,238 heat detections the satellites logged over the state in a year, most of them were too faint, or came from industrial plants.
The busiest month is March, with 149 hotspots — almost half of the year in a single month, and that is worth explaining. Early spring is when prescribed burning happens: land managers burn prairies and woodlands to keep them healthy, and farmers clear fields before planting. The satellite cannot tell a prescribed burn from a wildfire, and neither can this map.
The single most intense reading of the year came on March 9, 2026 near Chandlerville, at roughly 1,279 megawatts of radiative power. Not every detection makes it onto the map: we plot a fire only when the heat measured around it adds up to at least 50 MW, or 40 MW when ten or more detections cluster together. Below that it is almost always a small field burn.
Wildfires in Illinois
Continuously updated last satellite pass: 16:36 (Central Time)
1 fire detected
So far in 2026, 85,357 hectares have burned in Illinois, across 367 fires mapped by satellite. These are Sentinel-2 burn perimeters: they count large fires, not every blaze.
- Athens (IL) Illinois · 52.2 km away
No fires detected by satellite in the last 24 hours.
How to read this map
The data is re-read every fifteen minutes, but the real cadence comes from the satellites: they pass overhead six to eight times a day. The time of the last satellite pass is always shown next to the title — that is the moment this map actually refers to.
This is not an official incident log. There is no public real-time feed of fire department dispatches, so what you see here are satellite detections, filtered to remove permanent heat sources that burn all year and are not wildfires — the steel mills of Granite City and, across the state line, of Gary and East Chicago, and the refineries around Robinson, Wood River and Joliet. In an emergency, call 911.
Wildfire map — frequently asked questions
How are these fires detected?
Each hotspot is a thermal anomaly measured by NASA satellites: the VIIRS sensors (375-metre resolution) aboard Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21, plus MODIS (1 kilometre). Every satellite pass measures the fire radiative power in megawatts, which is what sets the size of the circle on the map.
How often does the map update?
The data is re-read every 15 minutes, but the real cadence comes from the satellites: they pass overhead 6-8 times a day, and the data is available within about an hour of each pass. That is why the time of the last satellite pass is always shown next to the title — several hours can go by between one pass and the next.
Why is a fire I have heard about missing from the map?
Three reasons are possible. The satellite has not passed over that area yet. Clouds or heavy smoke hid the fire at the moment of the pass. Or the fire is too small or too weak to clear the threshold we filter at: below that level the satellite mostly sees agricultural burns and brush.
Does the map show every hotspot the satellite sees?
No, deliberately. We exclude permanent heat sources — refineries, steel mills, gas flares — that burn all year and are not wildfires; in Texas in particular the Permian Basin flares would otherwise fill the map. We also exclude the faintest detections, which are almost always agricultural burns. The number of excluded detections is always shown below the map.
Does this data come from the fire service?
No. There is no public real-time feed of fire department or wildland crew dispatches: what this map shows are satellite detections, not an official record of active incidents. In an emergency, call 911.
What do the colours and circle sizes mean?
Size grows with the total radiative power of the hotspot, on a logarithmic scale: a circle twice as wide is not twice the fire, but an order of magnitude larger. Colour summarises the same measure in three levels: yellow for moderate intensity, orange for high, red for very high.