Nasa Firms MCP server

@pipeworx/nasa-firms

Satellite active-fire detections from NASA FIRMS — every pixel MODIS or VIIRS measured as actively burning, published within ~3 hours of satellite overpass.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Tools

bounding box. bbox is west,south,east,north in degrees, or "world".

• firmshotspotsarea(bbox, source?, day_range?, date?, limit?) — detections inside a

detections around a point, sorted nearest first with distance_km.

• firmshotspotsnear(latitude, longitude, radiuskm?, source?, dayrange?, date?) —

Call it before a historical query so an empty result can be read as "outside the archive" rather than "no fires".

• firmsdataavailability(source?) — first and last date each sensor product covers.

Auth

BYO only. FIRMS requires a MAPKEY and publishes no keyless or demo path — verified 2026-09-17: every route answers Invalid MAPKEY. (HTTP 400/401) without one. Pass it as apiKey; the platform fallback env var is PLATFORMNASAFIRMSKEY.

The key is free and self-service at — an email address, no approval step. Limit is 5,000 transactions per 10 minutes, and a multi-day query counts as several transactions.

Data sources

hotspot detections. The key goes in the PATH, not a header or a query param.

• —

• — archive coverage.

Things the next person would otherwise rediscover

two-character slice reports it as 52:00 and gets the hour wrong for every pre-10:00 overpass.

• acqtime is HHMM with leading zeros dropped.** "52" means 00:52Z. A naive

brightti5; MODIS reports brightness / brightt31. Both are mapped to brightnessk / brightt31_k.

• Brightness column names differ by sensor. VIIRS reports bright_ti4 /

index lists them as "Feature currently not available" and they answer Invalid API call. (HTTP 400). firmshotspotscountry was therefore NOT built. Do not emulate it with a country bounding box — a box around Chile contains Argentina, and the caller would get neighbouring fires labelled as the country they asked for. firmshotspotsnear is the honest shape.

• The /api/country/ and /api/countries/ routes are dead. FIRMS' own API

date when one is given, backward from today when it is not.

• dayrange is capped at 5** by the upstream, and is counted FORWARD from

so the response body is the diagnosis and is surfaced verbatim.

• Errors arrive as a bare English sentence, not JSON, at HTTP 400/401/403 —

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nasa-firms": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nasa-firms/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nasa-firms/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.