Blackwater Radar: terms and privacy

Updated 28 September 2026 · back to the map

By using this map you agree to these terms, to this privacy notice and to the YouTube Terms of Service.

Terms of use

• Blackwater Radar is a free weather map made from public data. It is provided as is, without any warranty.
• Air quality readings come from AirNow (U.S. EPA) and the state, local, tribal and Canadian agencies that report to it; temporary smoke monitors come through the USFS AirFire program. They are preliminary, have not been verified, and may change. The interpolated air quality map is AirNow's, made from monitors only.
• Fire locations, sizes and perimeters come from the National Interagency Fire Center (WFIGS), Natural Resources Canada's Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (Open Government Licence – Canada) and the BC Wildfire Service (Open Government Licence – British Columbia). Satellite hotspots: we acknowledge the use of data from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), part of EOSDIS, and NOAA's Next Generation Fire System (beta, provided as is). Hotspots are heat detections, not verified fires.
• Smoke forecasts are NOAA's High-Resolution Rapid Refresh model (HRRR-Smoke, NCEP), taken from NOAA's open data on AWS. They are model output, not measurements, and can miss or misplace smoke from new fires.
• Some webcam images are thumbnails of YouTube live streams, shown through the YouTube API Services. By using this map you agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service. Those thumbnails and their live status come from YouTube; each camera's name, map position and owner link come from this map.
• Blackwater Radar is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google, or by the owners of the cameras it shows.

Privacy

• This site has no accounts or sign-in, no advertising, no analytics or tracking code, and sets no cookies. The site itself collects, stores and shares no information about you.
• YouTube API Services. This site uses YouTube API Services to learn which YouTube webcams are live and to get their thumbnails. It asks once an hour, in the job that builds the map's data, and sends nothing about you to YouTube. See the Google Privacy Policy.
• Stored on your device. The page keeps your region, the panel sections you folded and any map you saved as your default in your browser's local storage. They never leave your device; clearing this site's data removes them.
• Your location. On a first visit the page may ask for your location, only to open the region you are in. It is used inside your browser and sent nowhere.
• Content from other servers. Your browser loads map tiles from Esri and OpenTopoMap, weather data from this site's file store, and each webcam image straight from its owner's server, including YouTube's servers for YouTube webcams. When you click the map, the clicked point is sent to the National Weather Service's API for a forecast. Like any web server, these see your IP address and browser details, under their own privacy policies.
• Hosting. The page is served by Cloudflare, which handles each request the way any web host does.