Current Wildfires in the United States
With ArcGIS API
This map shows live data of wildfires via MODIS satellites taken from the US Forest Service Fire Data in Google Earth webpage. Included are location and intelligence information of currently-tracked large wildfire incidents monitored by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) and Canadian provincial and territorial fire management agencies. This was created using ESRI's ArcGIS API and a URL to a KML file for live wildfire (large incidents) updates.
An HTML file was created for this map referencing the KML on the Forest Service website. The basemap was changed to satellite imagery for comparison to the Google API version, while most everything else was done by the KML itself. With the ESRI API as well, the extent automatically zooms to the extent of the layer (i.e. the active large wildfires from the KML). This HTML file was then referenced as an iframe to fill in the section below, while the full screen version can be viewed by clicking the button below.
KML files along with ESRI AcrGIS API is simple but slightly more frustrating than Google. ESRI deos not import the legend and attribute information along with the KML, thus if you want to add a legend then it must come from the API code. The main downfall of KML remains the lack of ease and ability to customize the style of the map.