Forest Fire Watch
Loading satellite detections…

The ground itself is on fire.

Live satellite fire monitoring for Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan: every active fire detected on Earth in the last 24 hours.

NASA FIRMS waiting for data… Support firefighters →

Worldwide hotspots

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Last 24 hours

Indonesia hotspots

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Archipelago-wide

Peak FRP

—MW

Strongest single fire

Worst AQI city

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Checking stations…

Kalimantan Tengah · Regency watch

Six places, six different skies.

Fire counts use each regency’s approximate bounding box over the last 24 hours. Air readings come from the nearest model station.

Kota Palangkaraya

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—hotspots

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Fire risk—

Kab. Pulang Pisau

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—hotspots

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Fire risk—

Kab. Kapuas

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—hotspots

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Fire risk—

Kab. Seruyan

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—hotspots

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Fire risk—

Kab. Kotawaringin Timur

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—hotspots

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Fire risk—

Kab. Barito Selatan

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—hotspots

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Fire risk—

Air quality

What Palangkaraya is breathing right now.

Connecting…

US AQI — —

What to do

Reading the air…

PM2.5

—µg/m³

WHO 24 h guideline: 15

PM10

—µg/m³

WHO 24 h guideline: 45

PM2.5 today, hour by hour (log scale)

Lines mark WHO 24-hour (15 µg/m³) and annual (5 µg/m³) guidelines. Values come from an atmospheric model and can read far higher than ground sensors during smoke events.

How Palangkaraya compares right now (US AQI, model estimate)

Palangkaraya—
Jakarta—
Singapore—
Global city average (8 major cities)—
01

Mask up properly

An N95 or KN95 that seals on your face. Cloth and surgical masks do not stop PM2.5.

02

Seal one clean room

Close windows, run a purifier if you have one, and keep the family in that room on the worst days.

03

Check on the vulnerable

Babies, elders, pregnant women and anyone with asthma or heart disease. Wheezing is a reason to seek care.

Weather and fire risk

The conditions that decide whether a fire spreads.

Connecting…

Temperature

—°C

Humidity

—%

Precipitation

—mm

 

Wind

—km/h

from —

Smoke drift: reading wind…

Fire risk index

LowModerateHighExtreme

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Score out of 7: heat above 32 °C adds 2, humidity under 40% adds 2, wind over 20 km/h adds 1, under 1 mm of rain adds 2. A planning indicator from current weather, not an official forecast.

The crisis

The air that never gets a rest.

Water is the cure, and the cure was drained away. Peat that cannot be seen burning cannot be put out.

Months

a peat fire can survive underground

3,000+

AQI readings reported in the city in 2015

100,000+

premature deaths projected by modelling of that season

Around Palangkaraya the ground is a sponge of dead plants thousands of years deep. Called gambut locally, it holds more carbon per hectare than almost any forest. As long as it stays soaked it is a fire-proof carbon vault. Drain it, and the vault becomes a slow fuse.

That is the story of Central Kalimantan. A 1990s plan to farm rice on the swamp cut canals through it, the rice failed, and the canals kept draining. Every dry season since, a small spark finds ground that is ready to burn.

Why peat fires are different

They burn below

Combustion follows roots and old peat layers down into the soil, breathing through cracks. A hose on the surface barely touches it.

Water is not enough

Crews must soak the ground for hours and then dig it over, because heat holds on beneath a calm-looking surface and returns.

They smoke without flame

Smouldering is incomplete burning, so each kilogram releases far more fine particles and carbon monoxide than a blazing forest fire.

What the smoke does to a body

PM2.5 is measured against a World Health Organization daily guideline of 15 µg/m³. Reading the current multiple…

Particles this fine pass from the lungs into the blood. Through a haze season they inflame the airways, set off asthma and chest infections, strain the heart, and are linked to low birth weight and weaker lung growth in children. Schools shut, flights stop, and the most exposed are babies, the elderly and pregnant women.

The fires also release carbon that peat locked away for millennia. In dry years the haze belt’s emissions rival the daily output of entire industrial economies.

Seasons that defined the crisis

Act now

The fires won’t stop themselves.
Neither will we.

Forest Fire Watch does not collect money. Give directly to the organisations working on the ground. Each one is independent of this site.

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active fires on Earth in the last 24 hours

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US AQI in Palangkaraya right now

~250,000

people live in the city under that sky

Choose how you stand with them

Spark

A single gift

A one-off contribution when the smoke is at its worst. It tops up gear and fuel for crews already out on the peat.

Shield

Give your voice too

Share this map, ask your employer or school to back peat restoration, and tell one person why a wet swamp is a fire defence.

Where it goes

Borneo Nature Foundation

Peat-swamp forest protection and community fire response across Central Kalimantan, including patrols and research in the Sebangau area.

Visit their site ↗

KFCP

The Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership, a completed peat-rehabilitation pilot. A record of what was tried and what was learned.

Read the background ↗

Giving levels are set by each organisation on its own site. Check each charity’s status before you give.

Data sources

Open data, live.

  • NASA FIRMS

    Active fire detections from the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite, near-real-time. We acknowledge the use of data from NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS).

    firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov ↗not yet refreshed
  • Open-Meteo

    Air quality (CAMS model) and weather forecast APIs, used for AQI, PM2.5, PM10, wind and fire-risk inputs.

    open-meteo.com ↗not yet refreshednot yet refreshed
  • Leaflet and OpenStreetMap

    Map engine by Leaflet. Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors. Place search and reverse lookup by Nominatim.

    openstreetmap.org/copyright ↗idle