In response to the recent California fires, we’re launching a new, highly experimental layer: live fire detections from the GOES 17 (West) satellite.

GOES 16 and 17 are geostationary satellites positioned over the eastern US (16) and western US (17), streaming images back to Earth on a near-real-time basis. You’ve probably seen their imagery used for animated loops of hurricanes and other large-scale weather events. In addition to raw multi-spectral imagery, NOAA also releases a number of derived datasets, one of which is active fire detections. In the daytime, these fire detections are reported at 5 minute intervals.

The good news: Live updates. In addition to the satellite’s rapid update interval, the CalTopo map layer will auto-refresh to ensure you are always looking at the most current information, and the time of the last satellite image is displayed on the layer. For new or rapidly moving fires, this can be useful information to supplement between MODIS and VIIRS satellites passes from the “fire activity” layer.

The bad news: each pixel is roughly 2km by 2km, so the layer will only show larger fire activity. And an error of a single pixel is enough to place a fire over a mile off from its true location – this is not a layer that will give you insight down to the level of whether a specific neighborhood has burned. The “fire activity” layer is better for that use case, although even that is still a very imprecise tool that only reports approximate locations and is easy to over-interpret as having more precision than it does.

We are currently pulling data only from the GOES-17 (West) satellite, so the layer only provides coverage for the western US. We hope to integrate GOES-16 (East) soon, in addition to providing other GOES data such as imagery.

GOES has been on our “someday” task list for a while, but with the developing fires, the CalTopo team threw this layer together from scratch in under 72 hours. In normal times, we would spend considerably longer testing this layer internally, both to find bugs and adjust the way data is displayed. Be aware that there may be undiscovered bugs, and that the layer will likely undergo some significant changes in the next few weeks.

We’ve made a few changes to map layers including a major new addition!

We’ve added a parcel overlay for the US. This data set contains property boundaries and addresses (left image) for a majority of the US, and ownership information (right image) for many of those properties as well. This new overlay is live now for online use and called “Parcel Data”. We’ve also renamed the “Land Management” overlay to “Public Lands” to clarify the coverage of this overlay. Due to the cost of licensing data this overlay is restricted to Pro, Desktop or Team accounts only.

Offline downloads are not currently supported but will be added soon. We see a lot of uses of this layer for hunters, trail planning organizations, professional responders and many others.

We’ve licensed the parcel data from landgrid.com.  While Landgrid is still growing and does not have ownership information for all counties, we chose them because of their liberal licensing model and flexibility in accommodating our needs.  Going forward, this will allow us to build innovative parcel tools that would be cost-prohibitive with other services – for example, Pro users can now choose Measure -> Parcel Count, and quickly count the number of parcels contained within a polygon, a critical piece of information for first responders conducting door-to-door searches or fire evacuations.

If you’d like to verify which areas have parcel ownership information before upgrading to pro, a coverage map is available at https://caltopo.com/l/K6G8.  You will need to zoom in to your area of interest, for performance reasons we have to filter out parcels as you zoom out.  Red indicates that we have the parcel boundary and site address only, blue indicates ownership information is available as well.

In conjunction with this we’ve also restricted the Sentinel-based Weekly High Resolution satellite layer to Pro, Desktop and Team accounts. This layer also has 3rd party costs associated with it, and when we initially released it, we indicated it would eventually be restricted to Pro accounts and above.

We know not every coworker or friend has a pro account. If you share a map you’ve created with non-pro users, those users will still be able to see see a limited preview of the restricted layers.

Welcome to the new CalTopo website! We’ve created this website that supplements the core mapping product with additional information and resources. Our focus of the new site is informing customers more about CalTopo as a company, the subscription offerings and the differences between them and costs, as well as highlighting some of the unique features. You’ll be directed to this site on your first ever visit to CalTopo, but every visit thereafter you’ll be directed to the Mapping interface

Along with these other changes we’ve updated our Terms of Use

Thanks for continuing to use CalTopo!

Edit: We didn’t realize how many of you like to use RSS feeds! The reason they weren’t working was related to some proxying we are doing on the site (thats why it only loads your first visit). We have a fix and will deploy it tonight and that should resolve the feed issue.