Why is my satellite imagery out of date?
- Disaster Science
- Bushfire.io
- May 8, 2026
Table of Contents
If you’ve zoomed in on the Bushfire.io satellite map and noticed it looks years old (a recently built house missing, a new road not visible, a development that doesn’t appear), this page explains why, and what your options are.
What “satellite imagery” actually is
The detailed satellite map you see when you zoom in is a global mosaic of high-resolution photographs taken from space. Capturing, processing, georeferencing and distributing that imagery globally is expensive, both for the satellite operators who collect it and for the platforms that serve it to apps like ours.
Unlike the live geostationary imagery we use to track weather and fires (which we update every 10 minutes, see How to use Satellite Imagery), the static “base map” imagery is captured once, processed, and updated only periodically. In remote regions, that may be once every several years.
Why services like Google Maps look so fresh
It’s a fair comparison. Services like Google Maps and Apple Maps appear to update constantly because their underlying imagery is heavily subsidised by enormous scale: billions of users, advertising revenue, in-house aerial photography fleets, and dedicated capture programmes that the rest of the industry can’t match.
We don’t have that scale, and we’re a public-benefit platform rather than an advertising business.
How Bushfire.io’s economics work
Our free tier exists to serve the public during disasters. We pay our base-map provider per user load (roughly per app session that views the map). During an active fire season we routinely have over a million people using the platform, so the base-map cost is a substantial line item.
We use Mapbox for our default satellite imagery. We’ve raised the freshness question with them several times. They’re aware, and are working on a global refresh, but the timing isn’t ours to control.
Info
For context: imagery in remote or rural Australian areas can be 5 to 7 years old, or older. Imagery in capital cities is generally fresher, but still a year or more behind reality.
What you can do
Use Bushfire.io Pro for fresher imagery
Bushfire.io Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers get access to Satellite (ESRI), which uses ESRI’s World Imagery service. ESRI’s imagery is updated significantly more frequently than the default Mapbox mosaic, and is generally much closer to current reality, particularly in populated areas.
To switch to it on a paid plan:
- Open the right-side menu.
- Under Map Style, choose Satellite (ESRI).
Why don’t free users get ESRI imagery too?
We’d like to offer it. The blocker is cost: at the scale of a free public-benefit platform, with millions of users during fire season, we can’t absorb ESRI’s tile pricing on our own.
If you represent a government agency, foundation, or commercial partner who’d like to help fund fresher base-map imagery for everyone using Bushfire.io during disasters, we’d love to hear from you. Email [email protected] or get in touch. Leads, introductions and partnership ideas are all welcome.
What we’re working on
We build our own Sentinel-2 basemap: a cloudless 10 m mosaic, refreshed every quarter, in true colour, colour infrared and NDVI. Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers can already see the infrared and NDVI views in the app. We’re working towards fresher imagery for the free tier too, so that everyone benefits, not only paying subscribers.
