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Capture the current simulation state as Baseline, adjust the environment or let time advance, then capture again to compare.

Capture as Baseline Capture as Comparison Clear Comparison

Active detections / cells Simulated perimeter Heat / intensity glow Spot fires Terrain relief Land cover / fuel Wind vectors Roads Communities Evacuation routes Thermal proxy (residual heat)

Heuristic heat-decay overlay derived from the simulation, not live Landsat/VIIRS thermal imagery.

Ember couples a heuristic wildfire propagation model with a live evacuation routing engine. It is a decision-support simulation for exploring how environment and infrastructure interact — not an operational wildfire forecast.

Live: wind, temperature and humidity come from Open-Meteo, and active-fire detections (VIIRS, last 24 h) come from NASA FIRMS through EMBER's own server, which holds the API key. Cached / procedural: terrain elevation (USGS 3DEP), land cover (ESA WorldCover) and the road network (OpenStreetMap) are deterministic stand-ins shaped like typical values from each source. Every source is labeled LIVE or CACHED in the Data Sources panel; if a live request fails or returns nothing, EMBER falls back to its cached scenario and says so — cached data is never presented as live telemetry. Swapping the remaining stand-ins for the real sources would not touch the simulation engine.

Cellular fire propagation on a grid, factoring fuel (land cover), wind alignment, slope, humidity-driven dryness, and temperature. Probabilistic downwind spot ignition. User-deployed firebreaks locally suppress spread.

Roads are classified SAFE / WATCH / THREATENED / BLOCKED from projected fire proximity. A graph router (Dijkstra) recomputes least-risk evacuation paths whenever road status changes, penalizing threatened edges and excluding blocked ones.

This is an interactive research / hackathon simulation, not an operational wildfire forecast. Fuel coefficients, thresholds, and spread constants are simplified and tunable, not professionally calibrated fire-behavior parameters.