The Scenario
You coordinate outdoor events for a venue booking company. Summer season is six weeks out, and you're looking at a Google Sheet with 80 venue coordinates—latitude and longitude across columns A and B—ready to be confirmed for bookings. Your operations director pinged you this morning asking for a wildfire clearance check on every site before contracts go out. Wildfire season started early this year in two of your primary markets.
The bad version:
- Open Ambee's wildfire API docs, find the endpoint that accepts lat/lng, construct the first HTTP request with the Authorization header, run it, parse the JSON response for fire count and FRP fields.
- Paste the values into columns C and D for row 2. Go back, change the coordinates, run row 3.
- Realize at row 12 that you've been reading the wrong FRP field—Ambee returns two FRP metrics and you've been copying the wrong one for the last ten rows.
Eighty coordinates is not a "quick check." It's a full afternoon if you're doing it by hand, and that's before accounting for the time you'll spend correcting the rows you misread along the way.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent embedded in your Google Sheet. It reads the coordinate pairs, calls Ambee's wildfire API for each location, and writes fire count, distance, FRP, and category back into your columns—in one run, for all 80 rows.
Here is the prompt for this task:
For each lat/lng pair in columns A and B, check Ambee for active wildfires nearby and write fire count, nearest fire distance, FRP, and fire category into columns C–F
What You Get
- Column C: Number of active fires detected near the coordinates
- Column D: Distance to the nearest active fire in kilometers
- Column E: Fire Radiative Power (FRP) of the nearest fire
- Column F: Fire category or severity classification
- Rows with no active fires nearby show 0 in column C and "CLEAR" in column F
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some coordinates are in decimal-minutes format instead of decimal degrees
The coordinates in columns A and B are in decimal-minutes format (e.g., 37°45.3' N). Convert each to decimal degrees before querying Ambee for active wildfire data and write fire count, nearest distance, FRP, and category into columns C–F.
The team wants a binary CLEAR / ACTIVE FIRE flag instead of raw fire data
For each lat/lng pair in columns A and B, call Ambee's wildfire endpoint and write "ACTIVE FIRE" in column C if any fire is detected within 50 km, or "CLEAR" if none. Also write the fire count in column D for rows that are flagged.
Wildfire data needs to be joined with a venue name from a second tab
The venue names are in column A of a tab called "Venues." The coordinates are in columns B and C of the same tab. Fetch active wildfire data from Ambee for each venue's coordinates and write fire count, nearest fire distance, and fire category into columns D, E, and F on that same tab.
Kill-chain: check wildfires, flag high-risk venues, generate a clearance summary tab
For each lat/lng pair in columns A and B, fetch active wildfire data from Ambee and write fire count, nearest distance, FRP, and category into columns C–F. Flag any venue where fire count is above 0 or nearest fire is within 30 km with "HOLD" in column G. Then create a new tab called "Clearance Summary" listing only the flagged venues with their coordinates and fire details.
Ask for the flagging logic and the summary output together—SheetXAI handles both in one pass.
Try It
Open any Google Sheet with venue or site coordinates and get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI. Ask it to check active wildfire status for every lat/lng pair in columns A and B using Ambee, and your ops director has the clearance report before the afternoon standup. Also useful: appending 4-week fire risk forecasts or the Ambee hub overview.