Australia is in the midst of a massive brush fire season, with fires covering a much larger area than even California’s most devastating wildfires.

To help visualize the size and scale of the fire season, the Sacramento Bee created a map containing Australian fire data from the last week of December and California fire data from Nov. 8-15, 2018 – when the Camp Fire raged near Paradise and the Woolsey Fire broke out near Malibu.

The gray portions of the map are data from California, while the red is from Australia. Click or tap and drag the red shapes to move the Australia fire around the map for comparison. Zoom out to see all of the Australia fire data.

Tracking the locations of the fires is possible using data captured by NASA satellites, in turn fed into an online fire tracking system that provides near real-time reports of active fires. The data, available from the Fire Information Resource Management System website, was downloaded by the Bee and overlaid onto a map.

FIRMS data represents points of fire or other thermal anomalies. A point is placed on the map if satellites detect fire in a 375 meter region. Those points were then converted to connected shapes by the Bee using mapping software.

The data from Australia overlaid on the US may not line up exactly due to mapping projection. Regions are visually distorted in the creation of a map since the spherical earth is represented as a two dimensional rectangle.

This story was originally published January 9, 2020 at 1:12 PM with the headline "See how the fires in Australia compare to some of California’s worst fires."