Ambee Wildfire API

Ambee Wildfire API is a wildfire data product from Ambee for organisations that need to know where fires are burning and where risk is building near the assets they insure, operate or finance. It combines satellite fire detections with incident reports from authoritative agencies and delivers them as structured data.

Active fires are detected from satellite thermal imaging and carry fire radiative power (FRP, in megawatts) and a detection confidence score. Ambee's data-accuracy page states 95% detection accuracy for wildfire, using deep learning on satellite thermal data. Ambee classifies each fire as wildfire, prescribed fire or normal fire, and reports burned area in hectares and satellite-detected smoke plumes. Reported incidents add the fire name, burned area and status. Ambee's wildfire source list names MODIS and VIIRS (including NASA FIRMS), Landsat and GOES, alongside agency systems such as CWFIS, EFFIS, GWIS, GDACS and the US National Interagency Fire Center. An Ambee article adds Sentinel-2 for historical burned-area mapping. A 4-week forecast classifies weekly risk as low, moderate or high from the Fire Weather Index, Fine Fuel Moisture Code, weather and historical fire seasonality; the API documentation lists the forecast for North America.

Ambee states that active detections refresh hourly, the forecast updates daily and archives run from 2005. Data comes through a REST API, flat files (CSV, NetCDF, GRIB, Parquet), map tiles for Mapbox, Esri, CARTO, Leaflet and OpenLayers, and marketplaces including Snowflake, Databricks and Google Cloud. Stated uses include insurance pricing and claims validation, utility grid protection, property-level risk and climate-risk disclosure. It reports that 96% of active fire locations in the January 2025 Los Angeles fires fell within areas its forecast had flagged as high risk on 16 December 2024.