OnX’s New Wildfire And Smoke Layers Add Value To Popular Outdoor App

While trail testing a new Toyota Tacoma at the end of August, the OnX Offroad app popped up with a new feature. In the hopes of escaping the summer heat of Southern California, I had pulled up OnX as my guide to explore Monache Meadows, deep inside the Inyo National Forest. The end of summer also typically means fire season in California, though, and the OnX app surprised me with a new overlay that showed recent fire activity and smoke density on the more familiar topographical map that I use to plan and track off-roading routes.

To learn more about the new information available, I reached out to OnX’s senior software engineer Tony Cannistra, PhD.

“Wildfires are part of our landscape now, every summer” Cannistra told me. “While we’ve had these layers in the past, we’ve updated the data to be more recent and more granular for this season. Some are updated hourly, and we also offer more detail.”

OnX sources the data from a combination of sources. The National Interagency Fire Center provides boundaries for each reported wildfire, while new hot spots detected by MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) satellite sensors come courtesy of NASA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s rapidly refreshing model tracks smoke location and density, which OnX then overlays onto the app’s three different map options: Satellite, Hybrid, or Topographical.

“These satellite-detected points of heat are updated hourly,” Cannistra explained, “When overlaid on OnX’s maps, they can help our users visualize near-real-time conditions, seeing a fire on the map represented by a glowing yellow dot well before its perimeter is reported.”

The hot spots work well to show where, exactly, within the orange boundaries of a reported wildfire there might still be active flare-ups. Varying color layers, from a dark red block to a faint yellow mist, then signify where smoke has blown or consolidated due to wind and terrain conditions. On the adventure to Monache Meadows, the wildfire overlay appeared automatically in my OnX Offroad app, but I then needed to click into my Activity tab and toggle ‘Wildfire Smoke’ to the on setting in order to activate that layer.

The layers work well in both 3D and 2D map modes, and when combined with OnX’s weather reporting and forecasting feature, can provide a sense of reassurance while exploring the great outdoors. For example, while driving to Monache Meadows, the National Park’s signs reported the area as closed due to fire activity where I turned off US Route 395 highway just north of Pearsonville, California.

But I checked in OnX and saw that multiple users had reported Monache Meadows as being open in the preceding two weeks, and the app streaming through wireless Apple CarPlay showed where the fire activity had been contained—a fair distance to the southwest. Taking into consideration the map and user reports, I decided to make the journey up into the mountains with confidence.

“Unfortunately, outdoor enthusiasts in the West aren’t strangers to the risks in fire country,” Cannistra admitted. “Our Active Wildfire layer can help our users make an informed plan about the landscape where they plan to visit.”

OnX includes the full suite of fire and smoke layers in the app’s Basic and Elite membership tiers for Offroad, Backcountry and Hunt subscribers. But in addition to providing information that campers, hikers, off-roaders, mountain bikers or hunters might use to plan a trip, I also recently discovered that OnX’s fire and smoke maps help in more serious situations, too, when the recent Bridge Fire— at the time, the largest in California—expanded over the Angeles Forest and began threatening my family’s house.

While helping to prepare for evacuation, we all checked websites run by Cal Fire, InciWeb and the wind app Windy countless times per day. But Cal Fire and InciWeb only update once or twice per day, so I started using OnX almost exclusively as the most up-to-date source of fire, smoke and weather data in one place. The wind and hot spot information, in particular, provided at least some semblance of predictive behavior amid the stress of an oncoming wildfire.

I still prefer to explore off-roading and hiking trails with a paper map. Yet for anyone who lives in fire-prone regions, and not just those who regularly or occasionally enjoy outdoor recreation, this new feature makes OnX much more than just a useful tool, one that translates directly to safety and security. Priced at $34.99 per year for Premium and $99.99 per year for Elite, that investment seems well worth the expenditure for additional peace of mind. And hopefully, this additional information will help to raise awareness for safer practices in the regions prone to annual wildfires.