Maps: Tracking Southern California Wildfires

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The New York Times

Fires

By The New York Times

Camille Baker, William B. Davis, Madison Dong, Zach Levitt, Joey K. Lee, Bea Malsky, Lazaro Gamio, John Keefe, Agnes Chang, Pablo Robles and Julie Walton Shaver

Additional contributions by

Amy Graff, Isabelle Taft and Ashley Wu contributed reporting. Aatish Bhatia contributed production.


I worked on the team that helped to track the fires in southern California in January 2025. We first published our tracker on January 8, 2025. For over 20 days, we worked continuously, through nights and weekends, to collect and process the latest data on the fires.

We built automated data collection pipelines to retrieve the latest active fires list and their respective perimeters and evacuation zones from Cal-Fire and built maps and other charts that might help readers understand the state of the fires.

Depending on the conditions, the tracker included the latest fire weather warnings and outlooks for the LA region, animated smoke maps showing the changing density and direction of the smoke plumes, and wind maps to show the strength and direction of winds over LA.

By January 31, 2025, all of the active fires in the region had been deemed contained and the tracking efforts were sunset.

Sunsetting the fire tracker


Maps: Tracking Southern California Wildfires - The New York Times