Active fire detection products from the VIIRS and MODIS instruments on polar-orbiting satellites provide planet-wide fire detection at resolutions from 375 m to 1.1 km every 6 or 12 hours. Because the data products are continuously available online, they present an attractive data source for automated fire behavior simulations and forecasts. Active fire detection was used to initialize simulations previously (Coen and Schroeder, 2013). However, the scale of fire simulation is typically finer (30m-200m) than the scale of the satellite fire detection, there are false positive and false negative detection errors as well as geolocation errors, and there is no detection under clouds (Hawbaker et al., 2008, Schroeder et al., 2014). For these reasons, we believe that satellite detection should be used in fire simulation in a statistical sense only, rather than as a direct data input.