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WildGeo

WildGeo is the data backbone of the Wildcaster ecosystem: the part you never see, and the part that makes everything else possible. It gathers the environmental data a wildfire forecast depends on, prepares it, and delivers it to every field device on a schedule.

When a crew opens WildCaster on a ridge with no signal and gets a forecast in seconds, it is because WildGeo put the whole region on that device beforehand. It is built around a single idea: gather and prepare centrally, once, so that every device can work alone, offline, anywhere.

Europe-wide Automatic Offline-ready
Gathered and prepared centrally, once, so every device can work alone in the field.

What it gathers

WildGeo continuously pulls together the layers that decide how a fire behaves, each from an authoritative European source.

Weather. The forecast is driven by the German Weather Service's ICON-EU numerical model, refreshed four times a day in step with the model's own runs. WildGeo takes wind, temperature and humidity out to 48 hours, together with the upper-air conditions the smoke model needs, and converts them into a form the engine reads directly.

Terrain and fuels. Elevation, slope, aspect and a map of fuel types, described with the internationally standard Scott and Burgan and Anderson fuel models, define the ground the fire moves across. These are prepared once for a region and carried on every device.

Fuel moisture. From the weather it delivers, the system builds a live picture of how dry the fine dead fuels are, the single factor that most often decides whether an ember catches hold.

Dead fuel moisture map of the Iberian Peninsula, coloured from moist blue to critically dry red
Dead fuel moisture across a whole region: from moist (blue) to critically dry (deep red), refreshed with every weather run.

Fire-weather and risk. WildGeo folds in the European fire-weather index from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service and EFFIS, the national fire-risk maps from Spain's AEMET, and the Mediterranean fire-risk product from EUMETSAT's LSA-SAF, so the danger picture on the map reflects official guidance.

Fire-risk index map of the Iberian Peninsula, graded from low green to extreme red
The fire-risk index, from low (green) to extreme (red), across the whole territory at a glance.

Live fire detection. Several times a day, WildGeo pulls the latest satellite fire detections from NASA's FIRMS service, spanning the VIIRS instruments on the Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 satellites and the MODIS instruments on Aqua and Terra, alongside the active fires and burnt-area perimeters from EFFIS.

Satellite fire-detection map of the Iberian Peninsula showing active-fire hotspots
Live satellite fire detections from the VIIRS and MODIS instruments, refreshed through the day.

Imagery. High-resolution basemaps come from the EOX Sentinel-2 Cloudless mosaic and the European Environment Agency's very-high-resolution imagery, so the ground beneath the fire is shown in real detail.

How it prepares the data

Raw weather and satellite data is heavy and slow to work with. WildGeo does the hard part centrally, so the device never has to. Each region, a geozone, is cut out of the pan-European data and written into formats built for speed: terrain as a tiled binary the engine can read piece by piece with no decompression, weather as a compact cube already in the engine's own units, and imagery as self-contained map files. Everything is keyed to the geozone, so a whole team working the same area shares one prepared bundle instead of each downloading their own.

How it delivers

WildGeo builds centrally and delivers automatically. A device activates with its licence, learns the bounds of its geozone, and downloads the region's bundle once, over resumable transfers that survive a dropped connection and are checked with a cryptographic hash so nothing arrives corrupt. From then on it simply asks for what has changed: fresh weather four times a day, new fire detections and risk maps through the day, pulled as small updates rather than full re-downloads. When there is no connection at all, the device keeps working from what it already holds.

Why it matters

This is what lets the rest of the ecosystem run at the edge. Because WildGeo prepares everything centrally and keeps a single authoritative copy, every device in the field sees the same, current picture. And because it packages that picture for offline use, the forecast keeps working exactly where a wildfire takes the network away.

Built on Europe's Space Investment

WildGeo is built on Europe's public space investment. Its data comes from the Copernicus programme and the EFFIS European fire information system, its imagery from Sentinel and the European Environment Agency, and its forecasts from Europe's weather services and EUMETSAT. Field positioning across the ecosystem draws on Europe's own Galileo and EGNOS satellite navigation. As an ESA-backed project, WildGeo turns that investment into direct operational value for firefighters on the ground.