As Nebraska’s largest wildfire ignited, new – and old – tools helped track its movement

As the Morrill Fire took off from a field in Arthur County on March 12, people from across the state – and others based throughout the U.S. – were watching as it quickly raced across hundreds of thousands of acres.

A team of researchers was tracking the fire from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offices. Mike Pavolonis, wildland fire program manager at NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service, saw the flames break away and run for miles on a new AI-powered fire detection tool called the Next Generation Fire System (NGFS).

“We watched it from ignition,” Pavolonis said. “The very, very quick intensification of the fire and then just the unbelievable spread rate during certain periods of time – you could see it clearly unfold on satellite from space, and so I can’t imagine what it was like on the ground.”

Just two days later, the Morrill Fire had burned hundreds of thousands of acres and easily blew the lid off records held by previous Nebraska wildfires. And another mammoth fire was growing in more-populated areas in Lincoln and Dawson counties, forcing people to leave their homes and their fields as crews worked to back off the flames.

The system was unveiled in 2025 and has been used by most National Weather Service offices across the country, including in Nebraska. The technology uses satellites that can scan new imagery over an area covering multiple states every minute and generate a fresh image of the entire contiguous U.S. every five minutes. Once a fire is burning, NGFS can provide real-time weather and fire monitoring, according to NOAA.

“We wanted to build an automated system that was capable of extracting information on fires in a way that was consistent with how a human expert does it,” Pavolonis said. “Not to replace the human expert, but to be that force-multiplier for the human decision maker, because these satellites are taking images every minute. And then provide that information back to the human decision maker without having to comb through an absolute mountain of data.”

On March 12, the system detected the start of the Morrill Fire around 1:40 Mountain Time, and within 10 minutes, more detections showed the heat spreading with the wind, confirming to wildland program officials that a fast-moving vegetation fire was likely taking off. The agency alerted the county just 13 minutes after the initial detection, according to NOAA.

And when winds shifted throughout the evening, the system was able to spot a southern edge of the Morrill Fire flaring up, and the agency alerted first responders to where the fire was moving in near real time.

Pavolonis said it doesn’t provide all the answers, but it’s an important piece to the firefighting puzzle. The system cannot replace the people on the ground – who Pavolonis called heroes – protecting lives and property.

“But the ability to monitor for new fire ignitions and to monitor existing fires on the landscape on a minute-to-minute basis – even if it doesn’t resolve the finest of details on the ground – is a significant contribution that’s designed to work with all the other sources of information and technology,” Pavolonis said.

Satellite heat detections are routinely used by the U.S. Forest Service to estimate the extent of fast-moving wildfires. The data is also incorporated into other systems, such as updated fire maps displayed by Watch Duty, a nonprofit organization that provides real-time, human validated wildfire information to the public and first responders.

The organization started in 2021 by monitoring fire activity in three California companies, but it has quickly grown across the U.S. with 50 staff members and 250 volunteers. The fire-mapping system uses certified reporters and contributors to help establish fire maps and provide information like public alerts and evacuation notices.

Liz Caselli-Mechael, the chief communications officer for Watch Duty, said paid staff reporters help update information on fires, and the organization often has retired firefighters helping monitor situations across the country. She said the staff working on the Nebraska fires in March remember the severity and the quick spread of the Morrill Fire.

“It was really high-impact, and it really stuck out, even with what we see every day across the country,” Caselli-Miechael said. “But also the time of the season, I think, was cause for alarm for a lot of the team. We have a staff meteorologist who looks at a lot of those larger trends on weather patterns and what we expect for fire season, and I think there’s a lot of real continuing concern about where the conditions are for the remainder of the fire season and the likelihood of seeing fires on the record-breaking scale.”

Several Nebraska groups shared the Watch Duty website with others who wanted to keep track of the fire’s spread.

The director of the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency said that on the ground, incident commanders usually use multiple resources including the fire-mapping technology from NASA called FIRMS, data from the National Weather Service, aircraft and other resources.

But for those directly impacted from the fire, such as Ainslie Wilson in Arthur County, the old-fashioned telephone is typically the first alarm for alerting property owners that a fire might be coming their way.

“It’s just friends, neighbors, networks,” Wilson said. “We knew this one was coming from the west, and my sister-in-law lives in Lisco, and the fire started north of her, and we knew it was coming. It really is just a network of neighbors and friends and phone calls, and we even used social media at one point. I have a group of friends on Messenger, and I got on there, and I said, ‘This is where the fire is. It’s coming straight for us. If you have a rig, please come this way.’”

Wilson said others will communicate with the nearby fire departments and keep tabs on the changing winds. She said people who live in the drier and windier parts of the state rely on each other to keep an eye out for hot spots or anything that flares up.

“But really it’s just communicating with friends and neighbors,” Wilson said. “Trying to call each other and sitting on top of the highest hill that you can get to, and you watch the firefront, and you watch the smoke. You see which way it’s going, and then you start calling people.”