NASA FIRMS (active fire data): what it returns, and whether it works in Clay
NASA FIRMS (active fire data) is not available in Clay. It is best for Monitoring, Buying signals, Content demo. Pricing: Free. Access: Free with a MAP_KEY; limit 5,000 transactions per 10-minute window, and large requests count as several. Public CSV, KML and SHP files need no key. Licence: NASA open data; attribution requested..
Data domains: Government, Weather, Geography, Signals.
What does NASA FIRMS (active fire data) return?
Official fields (VIIRS S-NPP CSV header read from the public US 24-hour file): latitude; longitude; bright_ti4; scan; track; acq_date; acq_time; satellite; confidence; version; bright_ti5; frp; daynight. MODIS files use brightness and bright_t31 instead of the ti4 and ti5 bands. VIIRS pixels are about 375 m.
What can you derive from it?
1. Active fire near assets: detections within a radius of portfolio sites, customer clusters or supply chain nodes. 2. Fire growth: daily count of detections and summed fire radiative power (frp) per fire cluster. 3. Wildfire season intensity by county: cumulative detections, a demand signal for smoke, ash and water damage restoration. 4. Industrial flare and burn detection: persistent detections at oil and gas or industrial sites. 5. Post-fire rebuild zones: burned areas next to housing, which precede debris removal and rebuild permits.
How would a GTM team use it?
1. Revenue trigger: alert a restoration portco when detections appear within 10 miles of dense housing in its territory. 2. Monitoring: daily fire proximity report for a PE firm's industrial portfolio sites. 3. PE screen: rank western counties by wildfire detection history for a fire restoration or defensible-space services thesis. 4. Content demo: overlay a week of detections on a map of named distribution centres. 5. Diligence: check a target's claimed wildfire revenue against detection history in its footprint.
What are the caveats?
Not a native Clay integration as of 2026-10-17 (checked against Clay's integrations catalog). Can be called through Clay's HTTP API column where an API exists. A detection is a hot pixel, not a confirmed wildfire; it includes agricultural burns, flares and some false positives (check confidence). Pixels are 375 m (VIIRS) or 1 km (MODIS), so location is approximate. Near real-time data arrives within about three hours globally, faster in the US and Canada; the FAQ page itself was not readable today. The country endpoint was marked unavailable at check.