North India's annual smoke festival, tracked from space.
Every October the fields burn and the smog settles over Delhi. Official fire counts say things are getting better. Parali Watch puts seven years of NASA satellite data on a public dashboard, so you can check for yourself.
What the dashboard shows
Any start and end time, any of the six states. A map of every detection, district totals, daily counts by state and a Hall of Flame for the worst districts.
Satellite fire counts collapsing year on year, next to independent estimates of burnt area that didn’t fall to match.
When the satellites are overhead and when the fires actually burn. Spoiler: the evening is unwatched.
A sourced timeline of what every government and court did since 2015, and what came of it.
The economics behind the matchstick, and what Punjab could grow instead if anyone guaranteed to buy it.
26 real excuses, each linked to who said it. Keep it open during the next press conference.
How it works
- Fetch
A Go program pulls fire detections from NASA’s FIRMS every three hours: VIIRS on NOAA-20, NOAA-21 and S-NPP, plus MODIS. Reprocessed archives replace near-real-time data once NASA publishes them.
- Store
One gzipped CSV per day per satellite, committed to git: seven years in 56 MB, with byte-identical files when nothing changed.
- Locate
Each detection is matched to a district with point-in-polygon tests. Industrial heat sources are dropped where NASA flags them.
- Publish
A static site with one small JSON file per day. The browser does all the filtering, so there is no server and no database.
- Coverage
- Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttarakhand (Pakistani Punjab stored for later)
- Data
- NASA FIRMS, 2020 to now
- Updates
- Every 3 hours