What we monitor — and what it can't see

NASA FIRMS — satellite fire detectionLive

NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System publishes active-fire detections from instruments aboard several satellites. The two that matter for a property in southern Europe are VIIRS, at 375 metres per pixel, and MODIS, at roughly a kilometre — VIIRS responds better to smaller fires. NASA describes near-real-time detections as available within three hours of a satellite observation, on a best-effort basis.

We poll the FIRMS area feed every fifteen minutes for the box around your property and match each detection against your pin and your alert radius. That is where the distance, the direction and both timestamps on your alert come from: when the satellite saw it, and when it reached us.

What it cannot see

• A fire hidden by cloud, heavy smoke or tree canopy. NASA is explicit that these can obscure a fire completely.
• A fire that starts and ends between two overpasses. At mid-latitudes VIIRS gives three to four looks a day, not a live feed.
• A fire too small or too cool to register in the thermal bands.
• Fire burning beneath a dense canopy, which NASA calls very unlikely to detect.

No satellite service catches every fire — a service that claims otherwise is the one to worry about. We put both timestamps on every alert so you always know how fresh the picture is.

Meteoalarm — official national weather warningsLive

Meteoalarm is the network through which Europe's national meteorological services publish their official warnings for storm, rain, flood, wind and heat. The warnings are not ours and we do not second-guess them: they are issued by the same national services the authorities in your country rely on, and graded yellow, orange or red by severity. Warnings data is provided by EUMETNET members via Meteoalarm.

One detail worth stating plainly, because it is the hard part: for the five countries we cover, warnings are published against named administrative regions rather than map shapes. We hold the official boundary for every one of those regions, so a warning is matched to your property by testing whether your pin actually falls inside the warned area — not by guessing from the region's name or a rectangle drawn around it.

What it cannot tell you

• A warning covers a whole region, not a street. It says the area you are in is expected to see severe weather — never that your building will.
• Forecasts change. Services update and withdraw warnings, and the version in your inbox is the one that was current when we sent it.
• Yellow-level warnings are common in a Mediterranean summer, so we do not email them. They are on your dashboard; orange and red reach you directly.

Copernicus EFFIS — fire dangerRolling out this season

The European Forest Fire Information System has been part of the EU's Copernicus Emergency Management Service since 2015, run by the European Commission with national fire administrations. Its fire-danger rating answers a different question from a detection: not is something burning, but how readily would it burn today.

Danger ratings are context, not an alarm. When this lands, it belongs in the calm morning digest — the line that tells you today is a day to pay attention — and never in an urgent alert on its own.

What Vedetta adds

The sources above are public. Anyone can look at a fire map. What is genuinely hard is the part in between: knowing which of thousands of daily detections is near your house, at three in the morning, when you are two thousand kilometres away and asleep.

So we match every detection against your pin, work out distance and bearing from the property rather than the nearest town, add which way the wind is pushing it, and send one calm message — with a link to the official guidance for your country. We tell you when to look. The authorities tell everyone what to do.